Origin of the dual rate- and phase codes of space in the hippocampus and medial entorhinal cortex

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Leibold
• Subject Area: Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251236949

• Final Report Year: 2019

Final Report Abstract

Neural representations of space during free navigation can be found in the hippocampus and the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC). The main goal of the project was to elucidate the interplay between the space representations in both brain structures. We found that dysfunctional MEC inputs did not remove hippocampal CA1 spatial tuning but destroyed spike-timing correlations between place cells and reduced the amount of offline sequence replay, while not affecting baseline sequence activity. Related modelling work showed that MEC grid fields can be explained as a result of hippocampal place cell correlations in combination with Hebbian spike-timing dependent learning rules.

Publications

• The medial entorhinal cortex is necessary for temporal organization of hippocampal neuronal activity. Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 18. 2015, No. 8, pp. 1123-1132.
  Schlesiger, Magdalene I., Cannova, Christopher C., Boublil, Brittney L., Hales, Jena B., Mankin, Emily A., Brandon, Mark P., Leutgeb, Jill K., Leibold, Christian, Leutgeb, Stefan
  
• Asymmetry of Neuronal Combinatorial Codes Arises from Minimizing Synaptic Weight Change. Neural Computation, Vol. 28. 2016, No. 8: pp. 1527-1552.
  Leibold, Christian ; Monsalve-Mercado, Mauro M.
  
• Hippocampal Spike-Timing Correlations Lead to Hexagonal Grid Fields. Physical Review Letters, Vol. 119. 2017, No. 3, 38101.
  Monsalve-Mercado, Mauro M.; Leibold, Christian
  
• Traveling Theta Waves and the Hippocampal Phase Code. Scientific Reports, Vol. 7. 2017, 7678.
  Leibold, Christian ; Monsalve-Mercado, Mauro M.
  
• Hippocampal CA1 replay becomes less prominent but more rigid without inputs from medical entorhinal cortex. Nature Communications, Vol. 10. 2019, 1341.
  Chenani, Alireza; Sabariego, M.; Schlesiger, M. I.; Leutgeb, Jill K.; Leutgeb, Stefan; Leibold, Christian