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Aging effects on spatial tuning of hippocampal place cells in mice

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Abstract

One reason the electrophysiological correlates of hippocampal neurons are of interest is the possibility that they reflect their representational properties, presumably spatial/relational ones. Stable spatial representations, based on activity of ensembles of hippocampal place cells, initially develop through a series of short-episodic spatial tunings. Hence these short-episodic spatial tunings are important for understanding the establishment of stable place fields. Studies of age-related changes in place cell activities traditionally focus on place fields. In the present study, we characterized the short-episodic spatial tunings (1-min bins) of hippocampal CA1 place cells of freely moving mice in a familiar cylinder arena, and compared these functions in young and old mice. Spatial tuning was expressed by spatial selectivity, which we found fluctuated across a 16-min recording session in both young and old mice. High spatial selectivity, which is mainly due to the low firing of a place cell out of the place field in young mice, was significantly higher in old mice. The high firing rate out of the place field was the main factor contributing to significantly lower spatial selectivity in old mice. In addition, young mice showed a broad peak in the spatial selectivity between 4 and 10 min. In contrast old mice showed no peak in the spatial selectivity during this time period. The stability of place fields after a 24-h interval was also lower in old mice than in young mice. The low spatial tuning and unstable place fields suggest that a hippocampal-based spatial representation was impaired in the old mice. Furthermore, we speculate that the age-related impairment in hippocampal inhibition system may be involved in the impaired spatial representation of hippocampal CA1 place cells in old mice.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada for salary support and the Human Frontier Science Program Organization for a short-term training fellowship with Dr. R. Muller at SUNY-Brooklyn, NY, USA, who was a consultant on this project. This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Ontario Mental Health Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, University of Toronto, 600 University Avenue, Toronto, ON M5G 1X5, Canada

    Jun Yan, Yunfeng Zhang, John Roder & Robert J. McDonald

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada

    Robert J. McDonald

  3. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

    Jun Yan & Yunfeng Zhang

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  1. Jun Yan
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  2. Yunfeng Zhang
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  4. Robert J. McDonald
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Correspondence to Robert J. McDonald.

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Yan, J., Zhang, Y., Roder, J. et al. Aging effects on spatial tuning of hippocampal place cells in mice. Exp Brain Res 150, 184–193 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-003-1396-6

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