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Updated: Nov 26, 2025
Preparation of Parasagittal Slices for the Investigation of Dorsal-ventral Organization of the Rodent Medial Entorhinal Cortex
Published on: March 28, 2012
Layer 3 Pyramidal Cells in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex Orchestrate Up-Down States and Entrain the Deep Layers
Prateep Beed1, Roberto de Filippo2, Constance Holman2
1Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Neuroscience Research Center, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Berlin Institute of Health, 10178 Berlin, Germany.
Abstract:
Up-down states (UDS) are synchronous cortical events of neuronal activity during non-REM sleep. The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) exhibits robust UDS during natural sleep and under anesthesia. However, little is known about the generation and propagation of UDS-related activity in the MEC. Here, we dissect the circuitry underlying UDS generation and propagation across layers in the MEC using both in vivo and in vitro approaches. We provide evidence that layer 3 (L3) MEC is crucial in the generation and maintenance of UDS in the MEC. Furthermore, we find that the two sublayers of the L5 MEC participate differentially during UDS. Our findings show that L5b, which receives hippocampal output, is strongly innervated by UDS activity originating in L3 MEC. Our data suggest that L5b acts as a coincidence detector during information transfer between the hippocampus and the cortex and thereby plays an important role in memory encoding and consolidation.
