A lack of home-specific-related activity in MEC and PaS does not generalize to the brain or to the importance of the home cage for the animals behavior. behavioral use of the home cage during a hoarding task. Our work suggests that medial entorhinal cortex and parasubiculum do not remap after embedding the home, but local changes in grid cell activity overrepresent the inlayed space location and might contribute to navigation in complex environments. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Neural findings in the field of spatial navigation PK68 come mostly from an abstract approach that separates the animal from even a minimally biological context. In this article we embed the home cage of the rat in the environment to address some of the complexities of natural navigation. We find no explicit home cage representation. While both head direction cells and grid cells remain globally stable, we find that inlayed spaces locally distort grid cells. = 5 rats) we performed hoarding behavioral checks. For these we situated the home cage in the center of the market, and instead of randomly dispersing chocolates treats we dispersed standard food pellets outside the rats home cage. Food-deprived rats retrieved these pellets and horded them inside the home cage without any specific teaching. Rats hoarded up to 80 pellets in 20 min. Hoarding task versus no task. To dissociate the possible effect of the home location with the effect of the behavioral task, neural recordings were performed comparing No Task behavior. That is PK68 to say, that both in absence (open field) or presence of the home, rats were just randomly foraging for minimal sugary treats. This allowed for a fair behavioral assessment and the necessary occupancy for grid cell analysis. Histology. After perfusion, the brain was postfixed in Paraformaldehyde 4% for 12C18 h. The brain was then sectioned tangentially using the methods explained in (Lauer et al. 2018) and recording sites assigned by histology using immunohistochemistry of calbindin to correctly assign the PaS and MEC recordings. We did not observe significant variations in the populations and pooled cells from PaS and MEC. Analysis of spatial modulation. The position of the rat was defined as the midpoint between two head-mounted LEDs or coloured targets. A operating rate threshold (of 5 cm/s) was applied for isolating periods of rest from active movement. Color-coded firing maps were plotted. For these, space was discretized into pixels of 22 cm, for which the occupancy of a given pixel was determined as is the position of the rat at time the interframe interval, and a Gaussian smoothing kernel with ?=?5 cm. Then, the firing rate was determined as is the position of the rat when spike was fired. The firing rate of pixels, whose occupancy was less than 20 ms, was regarded PK68 as unreliable and not demonstrated. For spatial and head directional analysis, both a spatial ( 50% spatial protection) and a firing rate inclusion criterion ( 0.5 Hz) were applied. Spatial protection was defined as the portion of visited pixels (bins) in the market to the total pixels. Analysis of spatial info. For those neurons, we determined the spatial info rate, in the pace map; is the overall mean firing rate of the cell, and is the total period of a recording session (Skaggs et al. 1993). A cell was identified to have a significant amount of spatial info if the observed spatial information rate exceeded the 95th percentile of a distribution of ideals of acquired by circular shuffling. Shuffling was performed by a circular time shift of the recorded spike train relative to Rabbit Polyclonal to SLC30A4 the rat trajectory by a random time for 1,000 permutations. Analysis of grid cells. Grid scores were determined, using publicly available codes from your Derdikman Laboratorys recent publication (Ismakov et al. 2017), by taking the autocorrelogram, centered on but excluding the central peak. The Pearson correlation of the autocorrelogram with its rotation for 60 and 120 was acquired (on peak rotations) and also for rotations of 30, 90, and 150 (off-peak rotations). Gridness was defined as.