Abstract
Acetylcholine is vital for cognitive functions of the brain. Although its actions in the individual cell are known in some detail1, its effects at the network level are poorly understood2. The hippocampus, which receives a major cholinergic input from the medial septum/diagonal band3, is important in memory4,5 and exhibits network activity at 40 Hz during relevant behaviours6. Here we show that cholinergic activation is sufficient to induce 40-Hz network oscillations7 in the hippocampus in vitro. Oscillatory activity is generated spontaneously in the CA3 subfield and can persist for hours. During the oscillatory state, principal neurons fire action potentials that are phase-related to the extracellular oscillation, but each neuron fires in only a small proportion of the cycles. Both excitatory and inhibitory synaptic events participate during the network oscillation in a precise temporal pattern. These results indicate that subcortical cholinergic input can control hippocampal memory processing by inducing fast network oscillations.
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Acknowledgements
We thank P. Somogyi and A. D. Smith for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. E.H.B. holds a Medical Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and O.P. is the Christopher Welch Junior Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. This work was supported by the British Medical Research Council, and grants from The Wellcome Trust (to O.P.) and The Royal Society (to O.P.).
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Fisahn, A., Pike, F., Buhl, E. et al. Cholinergic induction of network oscillations at 40 Hz in the hippocampus in vitro. Nature 394, 186–189 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/28179
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/28179
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