Reinhold Kimberly, Iadarola Marci, Tang Shi, Chang Annabel, Kuwamoto Whitney, Albanese Madeline A, Sun Senmiao, Hakim Richard, Zimmer Joshua, Wang Wengang, Sabatini Bernardo L
Department of Neurobiology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Nature. 2025 May 7. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-08969-1.
Animals learn to carry out motor actions in specific sensory contexts to achieve goals. The striatum has been implicated in producing sensory-motor associations, yet its contributions to memory formation and recall are not clear. Here, to investigate the contribution of the striatum to these processes, mice were taught to associate a cue, consisting of optogenetic activation of striatum-projecting neurons in visual cortex, with the availability of a food pellet that could be retrieved by forelimb reaching. As necessary to direct learning, striatal neural activity encoded both the sensory context and the outcome of reaching. With training, the rate of cued reaching increased, but brief optogenetic inhibition of striatal activity arrested learning and prevented trial-to-trial improvements in performance. However, the same manipulation did not affect performance improvements already consolidated into short-term (less than 1 h) or long-term (days) memories. Hence, striatal activity is necessary for trial-to-trial improvements in performance, leading to plasticity in other brain areas that mediate memory recall.
动物学会在特定的感觉情境中执行运动动作以实现目标。纹状体被认为与产生感觉运动关联有关，但其对记忆形成和回忆的贡献尚不清楚。在这里，为了研究纹状体对这些过程的贡献，研究人员训练小鼠将一个线索（由视觉皮层中投射到纹状体的神经元的光遗传学激活组成）与一个可通过前肢够取而获得的食物颗粒联系起来。为了指导学习，纹状体神经活动对感觉情境和够取的结果都进行了编码。随着训练，线索引导的够取速率增加，但对纹状体活动的短暂光遗传学抑制会阻止学习并妨碍表现上的逐次试验改进。然而，相同的操作并不影响已经巩固到短期（不到1小时）或长期（数天）记忆中的表现改进。因此，纹状体活动对于表现上的逐次试验改进是必要的，这会导致介导记忆回忆的其他脑区发生可塑性变化。
