The thalamic reticular nucleus orchestrates social memory
Feidi Wang, Huan Sun, Mingyue Chen, Ban Feng, Yu Lu, Mi Lyu, Dongqi Cui, Yifang Zhai, Ying Zhang, Yaomin Zhu, Changhe Wang, Haitao Wu, Xiancang Ma, Feng Zhu, Qiang Wang, Yan Li
Abstract
Social memory has been developed in humans and other animals to recognize familiar conspecifics and is essential for their survival and reproduction. Here, we demonstrated that parvalbumin-positive neurons in the sensory thalamic reticular nucleus (sTRN Pvalb ) are necessary and sufficient for mice to memorize conspecifics. sTRN Pvalb neurons receiving glutamatergic projections from the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) transmit individual information by inhibiting the parafascicular thalamic nucleus (PF). Mice in which the PPC CaMKII →sTRN Pvalb →PF circuit was inhibited exhibited a disrupted ability to discriminate familiar conspecifics from novel ones. More strikingly, a subset of sTRN Pvalb neurons with high electrophysiological excitability and complex dendritic arborizations is involved in the above corticothalamic pathway and stores social memory. Single-cell RNA sequencing revealed the biochemical basis of these subset cells as a robust activation of protein synthesis. These findings elucidate that sTRN Pvalb neurons modulate social memory by coordinating a hitherto unknown corticothalamic circuit and inhibitory memory engram.