Medial prefrontal cortex shows altered social encoding in a schizophrenia mouse model

JAVIER GONZALEZ SANABRIA; VERONICA RISSO; JUAN E BELFORTE; CAMILA L. ZOLD

Congreso; XXXVI Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias; 2021

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.Recent studies in rodents have been focused on social cognition impairments related to SZ to explain its poorsocial functioning. We have previously reported that restricted ablation of NMDAR in cortical GABAergicinterneurons during early postnatal development results in SZ-like phenotypes in adulthood (KO). The medialprefrontal cortex (mPFC) controls many high cognitive functions reported impaired in SZ including aspects ofsocial interactions. To date, little is known about how mPFC ensembles encode social information and how thisrepresentation might be altered in SZ. Here, we use an in-vivo electrophysiological approach to record putativepyramidal mPFC neurons activity in KO and control mice (Ctrl) while they perform a discrimination task on anenriched linear track with a novel social stimulus (adult male) and an inanimate object. In Ctrl, we identifiedunits capable of encoding different aspects of the task, including neurons that discriminate social stimuli fromthe object and vice versa. The proportion of this type of units increased throughout the task in Ctrl. Conversely,KO displayed a higher proportion of non-coding units, suggesting an impaired representation of social stimuli atthe population level. These results place an insight on how the mPFC neurons encode social informationthrough a complex representation and how this may be disrupted in SZ.