Activation of Entorhinal Cortical Projections to the Dentate Gyrus Underlies Social Memory Retrieval

• DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.04.073
• Publication Date: 2018-05-22T10:43:40Z
• Authors: Celeste Leung; Feng Cao; Robin Nguyen; Krutika Joshi; Afif J. Aqrabawi; Shuting Xia; Miguel A. Cortez; O. Carter Snead; Jun Chul Kim; Zhengping Jia
• Keywords: Entorhinal cortex

Social interactions are essential to our mental health, and a deficit in social is hallmark characteristic of numerous brain disorders. Various subregions within the medial temporal lobe have been implicated memory, but underlying mechanisms that tune these neural circuits remain unclear. Here, we demonstrate optical activation excitatory entorhinal cortical perforant projections dentate gyrus (EC-DG) necessary sufficient for memory retrieval. We further show inducible disruption p21-activated kinase (PAK) signaling, key pathway important cytoskeletal reorganization, EC-DG circuit leads impairments synaptic function recognition and, importantly, optogenetic terminals reverses deficits transgenic mice. These results provide compelling evidence underlies recall PAK signaling may play critical role modulating this process.