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Updated: Jan 16, 2026

Acute Mouse Brain Slicing to Investigate Spontaneous Hippocampal Network Activity
Published on: August 28, 2020
Hippocampal ripple diversity organizes neuronal reactivation dynamics in the offline brain
Manfredi Castelli1, Vítor Lopes-Dos-Santos1, Giuseppe P Gava1
1Medical Research Council Brain Network Dynamics Unit, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Abstract:
Hippocampal ripples are highly synchronized neuronal population patterns reactivating past waking experiences in the offline brain. Whether the level, structure, and content of ripple-nested activity are consistent across consecutive events or are tuned in each event remains unclear. By profiling individual ripples using laminar currents in the mouse hippocampus during sleep/rest, we identified ripples in stratum pyramidale that feature current sinks in stratum radiatum (Radsink) versus stratum lacunosum-moleculare (LMsink). These two ripple profiles recruit neurons differently. Radsink ripples integrate recent motifs of waking coactivity, combining superficial and deep CA1 principal cells into denser, higher-dimensional patterns that undergo hour-long stable reactivation. By contrast, LMsink ripples contain core motifs of prior coactivity, engaging deep cells in sparser, lower-dimensional patterns that undergo a reactivation drift to gradually update their pre-existing content for recent wakefulness. We propose that ripple-by-ripple diversity supports parallel reactivation channels for integrating recent wakefulness while updating prior representations.

