• Takako Ohno-Shosaku, Mitsugu Yoneda, Takashi Maejima, Mohan Wang, Yui Kikuchi, Kaito Onodera, Yuji Kanazawa, Chitoshi Takayama, and Michihiro Mieda.
• Faculty of Health Sciences, Institute of Medical, Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa 920-0942, Japan; Department of Integrative Neurophysiology, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa 920-8640, Japan; Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Hokuriku University, Kanazawa 920-1180, Japan. Electronic address: shosaku@med.kanazawa-u.ac.jp.
• Neuroscience. 2023 Nov 10; 532: 8710287-102.

AbstractThe thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) is a thin sheet of GABAergic neurons surrounding the thalamus, and it regulates the activity of thalamic relay neurons. The TRN has been reported to be involved in sensory gating, attentional regulation, and some other functions. However, little is known about the contribution of the TRN to sequence learning. In the present study, we examined whether the TRN is involved in reward-based learning of action sequence with no eliciting stimuli (operant conditioning), by analyzing the performance of male and female Avp-Vgat-/- mice (Vgatflox/flox mice crossed to an Avp-Cre driver line) on tasks conducted in an operant box having three levers. Our histological and electrophysiological data demonstrated that in adult Avp-Vgat-/- mice, vesicular GABA transporter (VGAT) was absent in most TRN neurons and the GABAergic transmission from the TRN to the thalamus was largely suppressed. The performance on a task in which mice needed to press an active lever for food reward showed that simple operant learning of lever pressing and learning of win-stay and lose-shift strategies are not affected in Avp-Vgat-/- mice. In contrast, the performance on a task in which mice needed to press three levers in a correct order for food reward showed that learning of the order of lever pressing (action sequence learning) was impaired in Avp-Vgat-/- mice. These results suggest that the TRN plays an important role in action sequence learning.Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

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