Fan cells in layer 2 of lateral entorhinal cortex are critical for episodic-like memory
Abstract
Episodic memory requires different types of information to be bound together to generate representations of experiences. The lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) and hippocampus are required for episodic-like memory in rodents [1, 2]. The LEC is critical for integrating spatial and contextual information about objects [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Further, LEC neurons encode objects in the environment and the locations where objects were previously experienced and generate representations of time during the encoding and retrieval of episodes [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. However, it remains unclear how specific populations of cells within the LEC contribute to the integration of episodic memory components. Layer 2 (L2) of LEC manifests early pathology in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related animal models [13, 14, 15, 16]. Projections to the hippocampus from L2 of LEC arise from fan cells in a superficial sub-layer (L2a) that are immunoreactive for reelin and project to the dentate gyrus [17, 18]. Here, we establish an approach for selectively targeting fan cells using Sim1:Cre mice. Whereas complete lesions of the LEC were previously found to abolish associative recognition memory [2, 3], we report that, after selective suppression of synaptic output from fan cells, mice can discriminate novel object-context configurations but are impaired in recognition of novel object-place-context associations. Our results suggest that memory functions are segregated between distinct LEC networks.
Citation
Vandrey , B M , Garden , D L F , Ambrozova , V , McClure , C , Nolan , M & Ainge , J A 2020 , ' Fan cells in layer 2 of lateral entorhinal cortex are critical for episodic-like memory ' , Current Biology , vol. 30 , no. 1 , e5 , pp. 169-175 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.11.027
Publication
Current Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0960-9822Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Description
This work was supported by a Carnegie Trust Collaborative Research Grant to J.A. and M.F.N, a Henry Dryerre scholarship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to B.V., and grants from Wellcome Trust (200855/Z/16/Z) to M.F.N, and BBSRC (BB/M025454/1) to M.F.N.Collections
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