TY  - JOUR
AU  - Taylor, James
AU  - Hasegawa, Masashi
AU  - Benoit, Chloé Maëlle
AU  - Freire, Joana Amorim
AU  - Theodore, Marine
AU  - Ganea, Dan Alin
AU  - Innocenti, Sabrina Milena
AU  - Lu, Tingjia
AU  - Gründemann, Jan
TI  - Single cell plasticity and population coding stability in auditory thalamus upon associative learning
JO  - Nature Communications
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
SN  - 2041-1723
CY  - [London]
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
M1  - DZNE-2021-00487
SP  - 2438
PY  - 2021
AB  - Cortical and limbic brain areas are regarded as centres for learning. However, how thalamic sensory relays participate in plasticity upon associative learning, yet support stable long-term sensory coding remains unknown. Using a miniature microscope imaging approach, we monitor the activity of populations of auditory thalamus (medial geniculate body) neurons in freely moving mice upon fear conditioning. We find that single cells exhibit mixed selectivity and heterogeneous plasticity patterns to auditory and aversive stimuli upon learning, which is conserved in amygdala-projecting medial geniculate body neurons. Activity in auditory thalamus to amygdala-projecting neurons stabilizes single cell plasticity in the total medial geniculate body population and is necessary for fear memory consolidation. In contrast to individual cells, population level encoding of auditory stimuli remained stable across days. Our data identifies auditory thalamus as a site for complex neuronal plasticity in fear learning upstream of the amygdala that is in an ideal position to drive plasticity in cortical and limbic brain areas. These findings suggest that medial geniculate body’s role goes beyond a sole relay function by balancing experience-dependent, diverse single cell plasticity with consistent ensemble level representations of the sensory environment to support stable auditory perception with minimal affective bias.
KW  - Acoustic Stimulation
KW  - Amygdala: cytology
KW  - Amygdala: physiology
KW  - Animals
KW  - Auditory Pathways: physiology
KW  - Auditory Perception: physiology
KW  - Cell Plasticity: physiology
KW  - Conditioning, Classical: physiology
KW  - Fear: physiology
KW  - Geniculate Bodies: cytology
KW  - Geniculate Bodies: physiology
KW  - Learning: physiology
KW  - Mice, Inbred C57BL
KW  - Neuronal Plasticity: physiology
KW  - Neurons: physiology
KW  - Thalamus: cytology
KW  - Thalamus: physiology
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:33903596
C6  - 33903596
C2  - pmc:PMC8076296
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41467-021-22421-8
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/155166
ER  -