Marlene Bartos will focus in her talk on the role of GABAergic inhibitory neurons in controlling the processing and storage of live time experiences and events within the dentate gyrus as the input gate of the hippocampus. It receives rich multisensory information about space, context and events from the entorhinal cortex and translates this information for the downstream hippocampal areas CA3-1. By using 2-Photon population imaging in mice performing goal-oriented learning tasks in combination with optogenetics and pharmacogenetics, she sheds light on the role of the various types of inhibitory cells in the emergence, stabilization and recall of memory traces. Finally, by applying decoders and dimensionality reduction methods based on the obtained data, she aims to gain a comprehensive, conceptual and mechanistic understanding of the role of inhibitory neuron types in the encoding of information from the external world.
