Engrams and neural circuitry for episodic memory

情景记忆将特定经历的上下文信息存储在有时间组织的一系列事件中。外侧内嗅皮层（LEC）内的神经元可以通过经验编码固有地表示时间（Tsao et al., 2018），并可能通过远程投射将该信息发送到内侧内嗅皮层和海马。体内实验也表明，LEC在情景记忆形成中至关重要（Vandrey et al., 2019）。该项目将研究LEC内的神经回路，以了解细胞群之间的相互作用以及信息如何整合以在小鼠中产生情景样记忆。这将通过体外全细胞膜片钳记录和药物浴应用来分析电生理学，光遗传学与精确激光来激活特定的LEC细胞群或突触位点，免疫组织化学来可视化和分类细胞类型和共聚焦显微镜来实现。这项工作可以帮助建立一个模型，说明时间是如何在大脑中处理的，以及/或动物是如何组织特定经历的发生的。

Episodic memory stores contextual information of a particular experience within a temporally organised serial of events. Neurons within the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) can represent time inherently through the encoding of experience (Tsao et al., 2018) and may send that information to the medial entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus via long range projections. In vivo experiments have also shown that the LEC is crucial in episodic memory formation (Vandrey et al., 2019). This project will be investigating the neural circuitry within the LEC to understand how interactions between cell populations and how information is integrated to generate episodic-like memory in mice. This will be achieved using in vitro whole-cell patch clamp recordings with drug bath application to analyse electrophysiology, optogenetics with a pinpoint laser to activate specific LEC cell populations or synaptic sites, immunohistochemistry to visualise and categorise cell types and confocal microscopy. This work could help build a model of how time is processed within the brain and/or how animals organise the occurrence of specific experiences.