D-088
Selective inhibition of LEC-to-PCx projection neurons using a dual viral strategy
Magdalena La Valle1, Carla Concilio2, Julieta Campi3, Antonia Marín Burgin4, Noel Federman5
  1. Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires
  2. Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires
  3. Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires
  4. Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires
  5. Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires
Presenting Author:
Magdalena La Valle
malavalle@itba.edu.ar
The general framework of this work is to understand how experience modulates olfactory processing. In particular, we study the plasticity of olfactory cortex representations of odors associated with a specific aspect of sensory experience: the spatial context in which odors are presented. Using an olfactory-visual context associative task, we recently found that odor representations in the piriform cortex (PCx), the largest region of the olfactory cortex, also encode spatial context information. A candidate source of these contextual inputs to the PCx is the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC), a region widely involved in context encoding and memory processing, which is monosynaptically connected to the PCx. To investigate the role of the LEC-PCx pathway, we use a dual-virus approach to selectively inhibit LEC-to-PC projections in vivo. Specifically, we combine a retrograde virus (retroAAV-DIO-HM4Di-Cherry) with an anterograde virus (AAV-CamKII-GFP-Cre) to express the inhibitory DREADD receptor HM4Di in LEC neurons projecting to the PCx. Preliminary results show that dual injections successfully label neurons co-expressing both red and green fluorescent proteins in the LEC. Future experiments will assess how this manipulation affects PCx activity and the behavior of animals trained in the associative task.