Impaired In Vivo Gamma Oscillations in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex of Knock-in Alzheimer Model

The entorhinal cortex (EC) has bidirectional connections with the hippocampus and plays a critical role in memory formation and retrieval. EC is one of the most vulnerable regions in the brain in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease with progressive memory impairments. Accumulating evidence from healthy behaving animals indicates gamma oscillations (30–100 Hz) as critical for mediating interactions in the circuit between EC and hippocampus. However, it is still unclear whether gamma oscillations have causal relationship with memory impairment in AD. Here we provide the first evidence that in vivo gamma oscillations in the EC are impaired in an AD mouse model. Cross-frequency coupling of gamma (30–100 Hz) oscillations to theta oscillations was reduced in the medial EC of anesthetized amyloid precursor protein knock-in (APP-KI) mice. Phase locking of spiking activity of layer II/III pyramidal cells to the gamma oscillations was significantly impaired. These data indicate that the neural circuit activities organized by gamma oscillations were disrupted in the medial EC of AD mouse model, and point to gamma oscillations as one of possible mechanisms for cognitive dysfunction in AD patients

Separated Transcriptomes of Male Gametophyte and Tapetum in Rice: Validity of a Laser Microdissection (LM) Microarray

In flowering plants, the male gametophyte, the pollen, develops in the anther. Complex patterns of gene expression in both the gametophytic and sporophytic tissues of the anther regulate this process. The gene expression profiles of the microspore/pollen and the sporophytic tapetum are of particular interest. In this study, a microarray technique combined with laser microdissection (44K LM-microarray) was developed and used to characterize separately the transcriptomes of the microspore/pollen and tapetum in rice. Expression profiles of 11 known tapetum specific-genes were consistent with previous reports. Based on their spatial and temporal expression patterns, 140 genes which had been previously defined as anther specific were further classified as male gametophyte specific (71 genes, 51%), tapetum-specific (seven genes, 5%) or expressed in both male gametophyte and tapetum (62 genes, 44%). These results indicate that the 44K LM-microarray is a reliable tool to analyze the gene expression profiles of two important cell types in the anther, the microspore/pollen and tapetum

Theta oscillation and neuronal activity in rat hippocampus are involved in temporal discrimination of time in seconds

The discovery of time cells revealed that the rodent hippocampus has information regarding time. Previous studies have suggested that the role of hippocampal time cells is to integrate temporally segregated events into a sequence using working memory with time perception. However, it is unclear whether hippocampal cells contribute to time perception itself because most previous studies employed delayed matching-to-sample tasks that did not separately evaluate time perception from working memory processes. Here, we investigated the function of the rat hippocampus in time perception using a temporal discrimination task. In the task, rats had to discriminate between durations of 1 and 3 s to get a reward, and maintaining task-related information as working memory was not required. We found that some hippocampal neurons showed firing rate modulation similar to that of time cells. Moreover, theta oscillation of local field potentials (LFPs) showed a transient enhancement of power during time discrimination periods. However, there were little relationships between the neuronal activities and theta oscillations. These results suggest that both the individual neuronal activities and theta oscillations of LFPs in the hippocampus have a possibility to be engaged in seconds order time perception; however, they participate in different ways

Diverse synchrony of firing reflects diverse cell-assembly coding in the prefrontal cortex.

In the present paper, we focus on the coding by cell assemblies in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and discuss the diversity of the coding, which results in stable and dynamic representations and the processing of various information in that higher brain region. The key activity that reflects cell-assembly coding is the synchrony of the firing of multiple neurons when animals are performing cognitive and memory tasks. First, we introduce some studies that have shown task-related synchrony of neuronal firing in the monkey PFC. These studies have reported fixed and several types of dynamic synchronous firing during working memory, long-term visual memory, and goal selection. The results of these studies have indicated that cell assemblies in the PFC can contribute to both the stability and the dynamics of various types of information. Second, we refer to rat studies and introduce the findings of cellular interactions that contribute to synchrony in working memory, learning-induced changes in synchrony in spatial tasks, and interactions of the PFC and hippocampus in dynamic synchrony. These studies have proposed neuronal mechanisms of cell-assembly coding in the PFC and its critical role in the learning of task demands in problematic situations. Based on the monkey and rat studies, we conclude that cell-assembly coding in the PFC is diverse and has various facets, which allow multipotentiality in the higher brain region. Finally, we discuss the problem of the sizes of cell assembly, how diverse the sizes are in the PFC, and the technical problems in their investigation. We introduce a unique spike-sorting method that can detect small and local cell assemblies that consist of closely neighboring neurons. Then, we describe the findings of our study that showed that the monkey PFC has both small and large cell assemblies, which have different roles in information coding in the working brain