Specifically, the separate effects of increased spiking activity in SWRs (spikes/ripple) and increased abundance of SWRs (ripples/second) jointly resulted in an increase in the overall number of SWR spikes fired during rest periods (spikes/second). Indeed, KO displayed a six-fold increase in the number of SWR spikes during rest periods compared to CT (CT: 0.10 ± 0.02 spikes/s; KO: 0.62 ± 0.13 spikes/s, F(1,78) = 13.40, p < 0.0005; Figure 3C). In principle, this increase
in spiking activity may not by itself imply an alteration in the organization of information during each SWR. For example, the patterns of spikes associated with SWRs might be preserved, while being www.selleckchem.com/products/DAPT-GSI-IX.html both enhanced and more frequent. However, such a possibility requires that the identity of cells participating in SWRs would not be altered. Alternatively, overexcitability during SWRs might lead to a degradation of SWR-associated
information. To address this issue, we further analyzed the participation of single units across different SWRs. We found that single units in KO participated in a significantly greater fraction of SWR events than CT, increasing from JQ1 mw around a third of SWRs to over half (CT: 35.39% ± 3.44%; KO: 54.47% ± 4.00%; F(1,86) = 11.63, p < 0.001; Figure 3D). This finding indicates that neurons in KO were active during more than the optimal number of SWR events, raising the possibility that spikes in KO may add noise rather than signal to SWR events. Therefore, we analyzed the coactivity of simultaneously recorded units during SWRs and determined whether and how the information content of SWRs was affected in calcineurin KO. It has
been demonstrated that awake SWR events are associated with temporally sequenced activity patterns of hippocampal place cells, referred to as “replay” due to the resemblance to spatial activity patterns in prior behavioral experience (Davidson et al., 2009, Diba and Buzsáki, 2007, Foster and Wilson, 2006, Gupta et al., 2010 and Karlsson and Frank, 2009). It has also been shown that SWR however events are associated with consolidation of previously encoded memory (Ego-Stengel and Wilson, 2010, Girardeau et al., 2009 and Nakashiba et al., 2009), with encoding of a novel experience (Dragoi and Tonegawa, 2011 and Dragoi and Tonegawa, 2013), and, more interestingly, with spatial working memory (Jadhav et al., 2012) and the planning of future behaviors (Pfeiffer and Foster, 2013). Therefore, we hypothesized that temporal sequences of place cells associated with SWRs in KO may be affected.