A chemogenetic approach to understand the role of the piriform cortex in an olfactory-contextual associative learning task

SALOMON, LUCCA; FEDERMAN, NOEL; ROMANO, SEBASTIÁN A.; CAMPI, JULIETA; MARIN-BURGIN, ANTONIA

Congreso; Congreso Anual XXXVIII de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias; 2023

In the last ten years, new findings changed the way we think about sensoryrepresentations in the cerebral cortex, showing that their nature is plastic and can bemodified by experience. In particular, a unique feature of olfactory processing is its highdependence on past experience, context, and the animal’s internal state.To deepen the understanding of the modulation of sensory learning, we developed anolfactory-contextual conditioning paradigm in a virtual reality environment in which micelearn to associate an odor with a water reward when presented in a specific visualcontext.Here we studied the piriform cortex (PCx), the largest region of the olfactory cortex, byperforming in-vivo electrophysiological recordings while animals behave in the task, andstarted to address the importance of this brain region by bilaterally silencing itsexcitatory neurons using chemogenetics.Interestingly, preliminary results show that silencing PCx impaired the animal’sperformance. What is more, the ability to distinguish odors was more affected than theone to discriminate visual contexts. These results suggest that the piriform cortex playsan important role in the studied task and that it may be linked to both olfactory andassociative functions.