van Wijngaarden Joeri Bg, Babl Susanne S, Ito Hiroshi T
Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany.
Institute of Neurophysiology, Neuroscience Center, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany.
Elife. 2020 Nov 3;9:e59816. doi: 10.7554/eLife.59816.
Spatial navigation requires landmark coding from two perspectives, relying on viewpoint-invariant and self-referenced representations. The brain encodes information within each reference frame but their interactions and functional dependency remains unclear. Here we investigate the relationship between neurons in the rat's retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and entorhinal cortex (MEC) that increase firing near boundaries of space. Border cells in RSC specifically encode walls, but not objects, and are sensitive to the animal's direction to nearby borders. These egocentric representations are generated independent of visual or whisker sensation but are affected by inputs from MEC that contains allocentric spatial cells. Pharmaco- and optogenetic inhibition of MEC led to a disruption of border coding in RSC, but not vice versa, indicating allocentric-to-egocentric transformation. Finally, RSC border cells fire prospective to the animal's next motion, unlike those in MEC, revealing the MEC-RSC pathway as an extended border coding circuit that implements coordinate transformation to guide navigation behavior.
空间导航需要从两个角度进行地标编码，依赖于视角不变和自我参照的表征。大脑在每个参考框架内编码信息，但它们之间的相互作用和功能依赖性仍不清楚。在这里，我们研究大鼠压后皮质（RSC）和内嗅皮质（MEC）中在空间边界附近放电增加的神经元之间的关系。RSC中的边界细胞专门编码墙壁，而不是物体，并且对动物相对于附近边界的方向敏感。这些以自我为中心的表征独立于视觉或触须感觉而产生，但受包含以空间为中心的空间细胞的MEC的输入影响。对MEC进行药物和光遗传学抑制会导致RSC中边界编码的破坏，但反之则不然，这表明了从以空间为中心到以自我为中心的转换。最后，与MEC中的边界细胞不同，RSC边界细胞在动物下次运动之前放电，这揭示了MEC-RSC通路是一个扩展的边界编码回路，它实现坐标转换以指导导航行为。
