Associative learning changes the organization of functional excitatory circuits targeting the supragranular layers of mouse barrel cortex.

In primary sensory cortices, neuronal circuits change throughout life as a function of learning. During associative learning a neutral sensory stimulus acquires the emotional valence of an aversive event or a reward after repetitive contingent pairing. One important consequence is the enlargement of the representational area of the conditioned stimulus in the cortical map of its sensory modality.

Specific knock-down of GAD67 in the striatum using naked small interfering RNAs.

Small interfering RNAs (siRNA) are double-stranded RNAs of 9-29 nucleotides designed to reduce the expression of homologous genes by a process known as RNA interference (RNAi). Most studies using siRNA in neurons have been performed in mammalian cell cultures. Only few reports have reported the effects of in vivo infusion of siRNA into the brain.

Experience-dependent changes in spatiotemporal properties of cutaneous inputs remodel somatosensory cortical maps following skin flap rotation.

Contiguous skin surfaces that tend to be synchronously stimulated are represented in neighbouring sectors of primary somatosensory maps. Moreover, neuronal receptive fields (RFs) are reshaped through ongoing competitive/cooperative interactions that segregate/desegregate inputs converging onto cortical neuronal targets. The present study was designed to evaluate the influence of spatio-temporal constraints on somatotopic map organization.

Nursing-induced somatosensory cortex plasticity: temporally decoupled changes in neuronal receptive field properties are accompanied by modifications in activity-dependent protein expression.

This study is an attempt to gain insight into the malleability of representational maps in the primary somatosensory cortex in relation to the expression of proteins involved in inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitter systems that contribute to maintain these maps in a dynamic state. Malleability of somatosensory maps is characterized by changes in the sizes of neuron receptive fields (RFs) affecting the representational grain and in the locations and submodalities of these RFs modifying the map extent. The concomitance of these alterations remains so far hypothetical.