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Longitudinal Imaging of Cortical and Sub-cortical Inputs to Primary Motor Cortex During Motor Learning

Abstract

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Longitudinal Imaging of Cortical and Sub-cortical Inputs to Primary Motor Cortex During Motor Learning

by

Yuxin Hu

Master of Science in Biology

University of California San Diego, 2021

Professor Takaki Komiyama, Chair

The primary motor cortex (M1) is critical for motor learning and performance, and it is heavily innervated by inputs from the contralateral M1 (cM1), the primary somatosensory cortex (S1), and the motor thalamus. M1 integrates these inputs and sends out divergent outputs to different brain regions. To decipher how this relay system functions, we investigated the major M1 inputs to find whether there is a unique activity pattern for each input and whether there is a difference in their functional roles. Here, we expressed a calcium indicator in the above brain regions and used two-photon calcium imaging to study the correlation between movement and axonal bouton activity at M1 during motor learning. We also selectively suppressed the neurotransmitter release at synaptic terminals to investigate the effect of inhibiting of M1 inputs on behavior. We found these three types of inputs appear to be different from each other in terms of peak time, consistency of a single axonal bouton’s activity pattern across sessions, and correlation in activity between all axonal boutons from a single input. Therefore, we proposed the activity patterns for cM1, S1, and thalamocortical inputs innervating M1 are different, and the different functional roles of each brain region might account for the variabilities in activity patterns.

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