The cortico-hippocampal circuit is critical for storage of associational memories. Most studies have focused on the role in memory storage of the excitatory projections from entorhinal cortex to hippocampus. However, entorhinal cortex also sends inhibitory projections, whose role in memory storage and cortico-hippocampal activity remains largely unexplored. We found that these long-range inhibitory projections enhance the specificity of contextual and object memory encoding. At the circuit level, the GABAergic projections act as a disinhibitory gate that transiently promotes the excitation of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons by suppressing feedforward inhibition. This enhances the ability of CA1 neurons to fire synaptically-evoked dendritic spikes and generate a temporally precise form of heterosynaptic plasticity. Long-range inhibition from entorhinal cortex may thus increase the precision of hippocampal-based longterm memory associations by assessing the salience of mnemonic information to the immediate sensory input.

No abstract

Munc13 proteins are essential in neurotransmitter release, controlling the priming of synaptic vesicles to a release-ready state. The sequences responsible for this priming activity are unknown. Here we identify a large alpha-helical domain of mammalian Munc13-1 that is autonomously folded and is sufficient to rescue the total arrest in neurotransmitter release observed in hippocampal neurons lacking Munc13s.

Summary How does coordinated activity between distinct brain regions implement a set of learning rules to sculpt information processing in a given neural circuit? Using interneuron cell-type specific optical activation and pharmacogenetic silencing in vitro, we show that temporally precise pairing of direct entorhinal perforant path (PP) and trisynaptic Schaffer collateral (SC) inputs to CA1 pyramidal cells selectively suppresses SC-associated perisomatic inhibition from cholecystokinin (CCK) expressing interneurons. The CCK interneurons provide a surprisingly strong feed-forward inhibitory drive to effectively control the coincident excitation of CA1 pyramidal neurons by convergent inputs. Thus, in-phase cortico-hippocampal activity provides a powerful heterosynaptic learning rule for long-term gating of information flow through the hippocampal excitatory macrocircuit by the silencing of the CCK inhibitory microcircuit.

Presynaptic vesicle trafficking and priming are important steps in regulating synaptic transmission and plasticity. The four closely related small GTP-binding proteins Rab3A, Rab3B, Rab3C, and Rab3D are believed to be important for these steps. In mice, the complete absence of all Rab3s leads to perinatal lethality accompanied by a 30% reduction of probability of Ca 2ϩ -triggered synaptic release. This study examines the role of Rab3 during Ca 2ϩ -triggered release in more detail and identifies its impact on short-term plasticity. Using patch-clamp electrophysiology of autaptic neuronal cultures from Rab3-deficient mouse hippocampus, we show that excitatory Rab3-deficient neurons display unique time-and frequency-dependent short-term plasticity characteristics in response to spike trains. Analysis of vesicle release and repriming kinetics as well as Ca 2ϩ sensitivity of release indicate that Rab3 acts on a subset of primed, fusion competent vesicles. They lower the amount of Ca 2ϩ required for action potential-triggered release, which leads to a boosting of release probability, but their action also introduces a significant delay in the supply of these modified vesicles. As a result, Rab3-induced modifications to primed vesicles causes a transient increase in the transduction efficacy of synaptic action potential trains and optimizes the encoding of synaptic information at an intermediate spike frequency range.