The effect of Amyloid-(beta) and Tau proteins on the hippocampal neural(beta) and Tau proteins on the hippocampal neural networks and animal's ability

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Animals navigate through the environment by using a spatial map created in the hippocampus, the area of the brain crucially important for learning and declarative memory. Although we have already discovered the key components of this map (grid, place, border and head-direction cells)1, the exact causality between their activity and their role in spatial memory remains elusive. This is especially important, because Alzheimer's disease (AD) begins to develop in the hippocampus prior to the onset of clinical signs and subsequently spreads to the neocortex.2 Therefore, the development of the disease could in principle be understood by carefully monitoring the animal's ability to navigate from early to later stages of AD. In order to do this, we will design a fully-automated system for behavioral phenotyping of healthy and AD-model rodents. These insights will not only allow us to design efficient early diagnosis methods, but also elucidate a more precise functional role of hippocampal spatial cells.