Chicago, IL 60637
United States
Ph.D. Thesis Defense
Friday, December 13th, 9:30 am
Liz de Laittre, CNS
MacLean Lab
KCBD 1103
“A dexterous motor skill is stably encoded across days in cortex of freely-behaving mice”
Abstract: Our nervous systems are capable of generating precise, skilled movements consistently day after day. Whether the brain uses the same neural activity patterns to do so or whether those patterns are changing over time (drifting) is a matter of considerable study and debate. Here, we address this question by recording the calcium fluorescence activity of neurons in motor cortex of mice performing a skilled reach-to-grasp task. The high trial counts and single-trial variability exhibited by the mice allow us to take a statistically rigorous approach to quantifying the encoding of moment-to-moment movement details and compare across matched behavioral sets spanning a period of five days. We find that at the single neuron level, motor cortical coding for paw, digit, and head movements is strikingly stable. This suggests that the stable contribution of individual cells in the motor circuit underlies the generation of skilled movements, even for complex, sensory-driven behaviors like reach-to-grasp.