A novel role for medial prefrontal cortex in taste aversion memory

GONZALEZ CM; VILLAR ME; TOMAIOULO M; VIOLA H; MEDINA JH

Montreal

Congreso; 8th Annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, Montreal, Canada, May 25-28, 2014.; 2014

A novel role for medial prefrontal cortex in taste aversion memory Gonzalez C, Villar ME, Tomaiuolo M, Viola H, Medina JH   The role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in taste aversion memory processing has been scarcely investigated. Few works have studied its participation in conditioned taste aversion (CTA) extinction memory and only one work described a prefrontal b-adrenergic receptors requirement in CTA memory formation. Nevertheless, it has recently been described that mPFC neurons can encode aspects of gustatory stimuli suggesting that this cortex could be part of the encoding taste network.  In this work, we studied the involvement of the mPFC in taste memory processing using the CTA task in rats. We microinfused the protein synthesis inhibitor emetine, the GABAa receptor agonist muscimol or the N-methyl-d-asparate (NMDA) receptors antagonist AP-V into the mPFC before CTA training. We found that all these treatments impaired the formation of CTA long-term memory, but not its acquisition. Furthermore, we infused muscimol before a 72h-retention test session and observed impairment in CTA long-term-memory retention. These results indicate that neural activity, protein synthesis and NMDA receptors in the mPFC are necessary during training or early after for CTA memory consolidation and that this cortex is required for normal CTA memory retrieval. Altogether, our findings suggest that the mPFC is an essential structure taking part in the CTA memory processing network.