Engrams and neural circuitry for episodic memory

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.