Functional analysis of thalamostriatal pathway by lentiviral vector with retrograde axonal transport

将编码重组免疫毒素(IT)受体的逆行基因转移慢病毒载体注射到小鼠背外侧纹状体，在支配纹状体的神经元中表达该受体。它对注射载体的动物丘脑(PF)进行处理，可选择性地消除由PF衍生的丘脑纹状体通路的神经元。在视觉线索依赖的辨别任务中，这一通路的消除损害了反应选择的准确性，并延迟了运动反应。当在学习习得后诱导路径消除时，它干扰了任务绩效中的反应准确性，而反应时间没有明显变化。这些结果表明，丘脑-纹状体投射在辨别性学习的获得和执行反应中起着重要的作用。

A highly efficient retrograde gene transfer lentiviral vector encoding the recombinant immunotoxin(IT) receptor was injected into the dorsolateral striatum in mice to express the receptor in neurons innervating the striatum. IT treatment into the thalamus(PF) of the vector-injected animals caused a selective elimination of neurons of the PF-derived thalamostriatal pathway. The elimination of this pathway impaired the response selection accuracy and delayed the motor response in the acquisition of a visual cue-dependent discrimination task. When the pathway elimination was induced after learning acquisition, it disturbed the response accuracy in the task performance with no apparent change in the response time. These results demonstrate that thalamostriatal projection derived from the PF plays essential roles in the acquisition and execution of discrimination learning in response.