Abstract
Animals selectively respond to environmental cues associated with food reward to optimize nutrient intake. Such appetitive CS-US associations are thought to be encoded in select, stable neuronal populations or neuronal ensembles, which undergo physiological modifications during appetitive conditioning. These ensembles in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) control well-established, cue-evoked food seeking, but the mechanisms involved in the genesis of these ensembles are unclear. Here, we utilized male Fos-GFP mice that express the green fluorescent protein (GFP) in recently behaviorally-activated neurons, to reveal how dorsal mPFC neurons are recruited and modified to encode CS-US memory representations using an appetitive conditioning task. In the initial conditioning session, animals did not exhibit discriminated, cue-selective food seeking, but did so in later sessions indicating that a CS-US association was established. Using microprism-based in vivo 2-Photon imaging, we revealed that only a minority of neurons activated during the initial session was consistently activated throughout subsequent conditioning sessions and during cue-evoked memory recall. Notably, using ex vivo electrophysiology we found that neurons activated following the initial session exhibited transient hyper-excitability. Chemogenetically enhancing the excitability of these neurons throughout subsequent conditioning sessions interfered with the development of reliable cue-selective food seeking, indicated by persistent, non-discriminated performance. We demonstrate how appetitive learning consistently activates a subset of neurons to form a stable neuronal ensemble during the formation of a CS-US association. This ensemble may arise from a pool of hyper-excitable neurons activated during the initial conditioning session.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT
Appetitive conditioning endows cues associated with food with the ability to guide food-seeking, through the formation of a food-cue association. Neuronal ensembles in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) control established cue-evoked food-seeking. However, how neurons undergo physiological modifications and become part of an ensemble during conditioning remain unclear. We found that only a minority of dorsal mPFC (dmPFC) neurons activated on the initial conditioning session became consistently activated during conditioning and memory recall. These initially activated neurons were also transiently hyper-excitable. We demonstrate: 1) how stable neuronal ensemble formation in the dmPFC underlies appetitive conditioning; and 2) how this ensemble may arise from hyper-excitable neurons activated prior to the establishment of cue-evoked food seeking.
Footnotes
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
We thank Prof. William Wisden (Imperial College, UK) for providing the initial AAV2-TREtight-hM3Dq sample for the DREADD pilot experiments. Also, we thank Dr. Marsha Sindarto (University of Sussex, UK) for providing helpful advice with the generation of the aforementioned viruses and Nagisa Sawada (Fukushima Medical University, Japan) for providing assistance with AAV generation. We thank Alex Hoffman (NIDA IRP, USA) for providing helpful advice regarding the paired recording experiments, Bruce Hope (NIDA IRP, USA) for providing additional Fos-GFP mice brains for analysis, and Nobuyoshi Suto (Scripps Research, USA) for helpful comments with the manuscript.
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