Spatial navigation involves co-ordination between action planning by the prefrontal cortex and spatial representation of the environment in the hippocampus. In this study, when rats performed an alternating arm choice task in a T maze, the coordination of the timing of spikes between neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the thalamic nucleus reuniens (NR) and the hippocampal CA1 was found to increase; co-ordinated firing between supramammillary nucleus (SUM) and CA1 neurons also increased. Silencing of SUM neurons decreased spike-time coordination in the mPFC-NR-CA1 circuit and impaired representations of the trajectory of travel in NR and CA1, suggesting that SUM modulates the communication of action planning information from the mPFC to downstream targets.
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Ito, H. T. et al. Supramammillary nucleus modulates spike-time coordination in the prefrontal-thalamo-hippocampal circuit during navigation. Neuron 99, 576–587 (2018)
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Lewis, S. Planning a path. Nat Rev Neurosci 19, 581 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0061-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0061-9