Overview
- A peer-reviewed Science paper from NYU Langone researchers identifies a circuit mechanism in mice that stabilizes CA3 activity during learning.
- Two long-range projections from the lateral entorhinal cortex to CA3—excitatory glutamatergic and inhibitory GABAergic—operate together to support stable spatial representations.
- LEC-GLU excites CA3 and recruits feedforward inhibition, while LEC-GABA suppresses that local inhibition to enable recurrent activity that encodes place maps.
- Behavioral tests showed that shutting down either projection during training impaired learning of reward locations, whereas post-learning shutdown left performance intact.
- Patch-clamp electrophysiology and optogenetics isolated the pathways at single-cell resolution, and the authors note potential relevance to conditions with memory instability, such as PTSD or schizophrenia.