Differential encoding of odor and place in mouse piriform and entorhinal cortex

The integration of olfactory and spatial information is critical for guiding animal behavior. The lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) is reciprocally interconnected with cortical areas for olfaction and the hippocampus and thus ideally positioned to encode odor-place associations. Here, we used mini-endoscopes to record neural activity in the mouse piriform cortex (PCx) and LEC. We show that in head-fixed mice, odor identity could be decoded from LEC ensembles, but less accurately than from PCx. In mice freely navigating a linear track, LEC ensemble activity at the odor ports was dominated by spatial information. Spatial position along the linear track could be decoded from LEC and PCx activity, however, PCx but not LEC exhibited strong behavior-driven modulation of positional information. Together, our data reveal that information about odor cues and spatial context is differentially encoded along the PCx-LEC axis.