Studying the role of the piriform cortex in an olfactory-contextual conditioning paradigm.

LUCCA SALOMON; NOEL FEDERMAN; SEBASTIAN A. ROMANO; ANTONIA MARIN BURGIN

Buenos AIres

Congreso; XXXVII Congress of the Argentine Society for Research in Neuroscience (SAN). Buenos Aires; 2022

SAN

Increasing evidence indicates that representation of sensory stimuli in cortical areas is plastic and can be modify by experience. In particular, a unique feature of olfactory processing is its high dependence on past experience, context, and the internal state of the animal.To study contextual modulation of sensory learning we developed a GO/NO GO operant associative learning task in a virtual reality environment: animals learn to associate an odor with a water reward when presented in a particular visual context. Mice learn the task in around 6 days showing licking responses only in the correct association of odor-context. In addition, other behavioral variables, like inhalation rate and speed change with learning. To test the importance of the olfactory piriform cortex (PC ) in the learned association we used three different methods to bilaterally silence PC in expert animals: i) application of GABA agonist muscimol; ii) a chemogenetic approach to express hM4Di to silence excitatory neurons with the artificial ligand CNO iii) optogenetic activation of inhibitory PV neurons in PC (still setting up). Preliminary results with muscimol and chemogenetics show that animals with silenced PC have a decrease in performance suggesting a critical role of the PC in the behavior. Interestingly, silencing PC not only affected the ability to distinguish odors, but also the visual contexts, suggesting that the PC participates in the association between odors-contexts-reward.