Intralaminar thalamus

This article proposes a framework for understanding the macro-scale organization of anatomical pathways in the mammalian brain. The architecture supports flexible behavioral decisions across a spectrum of spatio-temporal scales. The proposal emphasizes the combinatorial, reciprocal, and reentrant connectivity-called CRR neuroarchitecture-between cortical, BG, thalamic, amygdala, hypothalamic, and brainstem circuits. Thalamic nuclei, especially midline/intralaminar nuclei, are proposed to act as hubs routing the flow of signals between noncortical areas and pFC...

A reduction in the volume of the thalamus and its nuclei has been reported in Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment and asymptomatic individuals with risk factors for early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Some studies have reported thalamic atrophy to occur prior to hippocampal atrophy, suggesting thalamic pathology may be an early sign of cognitive decline. We aimed to investigate volumetric differences in thalamic nuclei in middle-aged, cognitively unimpaired people with respect to dementia family history and apolipoprotein ε4 allele carriership and the relationship with cognition...

Engaging in positive social (i.e., prosocial) interactions during adolescence acts to modulate neural circuits that determine adult adaptive behavior. While accumulating evidence indicates that a strong craving for prosocial behavior contributes to sustaining neural development, the consequences of social deprivation during adolescence on social neural circuits, including those involving oxytocin (OXT) and vasopressin (AVP), are poorly characterized. We evaluated adaptive behaviors in socially isolated mice, including anxiety-like, social, and defensive behaviors, along with OXT and AVP neural profiles in relevant brain regions...

AIM: We aimed to investigate potential discrepancies in the volume of thalamic nuclei between individuals with schizophrenia and healthy controls. METHODS: The imaging data for this study were obtained from the MCICShare data repository within SchizConnect. We employed probabilistic mapping technique developed by Iglesias et al. (2018). The analytical component entailed volumetric segmentation of the thalamus using the FreeSurfer image analysis suite. Our analysis focused on evaluating the differences in the volumes of various thalamic nuclei groups within the thalami, specifically the anterior, intralaminar, medial, posterior, lateral, and ventral groups in both the right and left thalami, between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls...

BACKGROUND: The brain undergoes reorganization following spinal cord injury (SCI), but little is known about how the thalamus is affected in pediatric SCIs. PURPOSE: To characterize microstructural alterations in the thalamus after SCI with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) metrics. METHODS: 18 pediatric participants with chronic SCI (8-20 years) were stratified using the American Spinal Injury Association Impairment Scale (AIS) into groups: A, B, and C/D...

The purpose of this study was to automatically classify different motor subtypes of Parkinson's disease (PD) on arterial spin labelling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL-MRI) data using support vector machine (SVM). This study included 38 subjects: 21 PD patients and 17 normal controls (NCs). Based on the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) subscores, patients were divided into the tremor-dominant (TD) subtype and the postural instability gait difficulty (PIGD) subtype. The subjects were in a resting state during the acquisition of ASL-MRI data...

How sensory cues are integrated at the level of neural circuits to drive maternal behaviors remains incompletely understood. In a recent study, Valtcheva, Issa, and colleagues identified a previously unknown role for the posterior intralaminar (PIL) nucleus of the thalamus within the neural networks that mediate maternal behavior in mice induced by pup calls.

This study uses methods recently developed to study the complex evolution of atmospheric phenomena which have some similarities with the dynamics of the human brain. In both cases, it is possible to record the activity of particular centers (geographic regions or brain nuclei) but not to make an experimental modification of their state. The study of "causality", which is necessary to understand the dynamics of these complex systems and to develop robust models that can predict their evolution, is hampered by the experimental restrictions imposed by the nature of both systems...

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is important for maternal physiology and childcare, including parturition and milk ejection during nursing1-6 . Suckling triggers the release of oxytocin, but other sensory cues-specifically, infant cries-can increase the levels of oxytocin in new human mothers7 , which indicates that cries can activate hypothalamic oxytocin neurons. Here we describe a neural circuit that routes auditory information about infant vocalizations to mouse oxytocin neurons. We performed in vivo electrophysiological recordings and photometry from identified oxytocin neurons in awake maternal mice that were presented with pup calls...

In this study, thalamic connections of the caudal part of the posterior parietal cortex (PPCc) are described and compared to connections of the rostral part of PPC (PPCr) in strepsirrhine galagos. PPC of galagos is divided into two parts, PPCr and PPCc, based on the responsiveness to electrical stimulation. Stimulation of PPC with long trains of electrical pulses evokes different types of ethologically relevant movements from different subregions ("domains") of PPCr, while it fails to evoke any movements from PPCc...

The present work aims to review the structural organization of the mammalian superior colliculus (SC), the putative pathways connecting the SC and the basal ganglia, and their role in organizing complex behavioral output. First, we review how the complex intrinsic connections between the SC's laminae projections allow for the construction of spatially aligned, visual-multisensory maps of the surrounding environment. Moreover, we present a summary of the sensory-motor inputs of the SC, including a description of the integration of multi-sensory inputs relevant to behavioral control...

The neonatal brain is characterized by intermittent bursts of oscillatory activity interspersed by relative silence. Although well-characterized for many cortical areas, to what extent these propagate and interact with subcortical brain areas is largely unknown. Here, early network activity was recorded from the developing basal ganglia, including motor/somatosensory cortex, dorsal striatum, and intralaminar thalamus, during the first postnatal weeks in mice. An unsupervised detection and classification method revealed two main classes of bursting activity, namely spindle bursts and nested gamma spindle bursts, characterized by oscillatory activity at ~ 10 and ~ 30 Hz frequencies, respectively...

The intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus play a pivotal role in awareness, conscious experience, arousal, sleep, vigilance, as well as in cognitive, sensory, and sexual processing. Nonetheless, in humans, little is known about the direct involvement of these nuclei in such multifaceted functions and their structural connections in the brain. Thus, examining the versatility of structural connectivity of the intralaminar nuclei with the rest of the brain seems reasonable. Herein, we attempt to show the direct structural connectivity of the intralaminar nuclei to diencephalic, mesencephalic, and cortical areas using probabilistic tracking of the diffusion data from the human connectome project...

The intralaminar thalamus, in particular the centromedian-parafascicular complex, forms a strategic node between ascending information from the spinal cord and brainstem and forebrain circuitry that involves the cerebral cortex and basal ganglia. A large body of evidence shows that this functionally heterogeneous region regulates information transmission in different cortical circuits, and is involved in a variety of functions, including cognition, arousal, consciousness and processing of pain signals. Not surprisingly, the intralaminar thalamus has been a target area for (radio)surgical ablation and deep brain stimulation (DBS) in different neurological and psychiatric disorders...

BACKGROUND: The posterior intralaminar (PIL) complex of the thalamus is a multimodal nucleus that has been implicated in maternal behaviors and conspecific social behaviors in male and female rodents. Glutamatergic neurons are a major component of the PIL; however, their specific activity and role during social interactions has not yet been assessed. METHODS: We used immunohistochemistry for the immediate early gene c-fos as a proxy for neuronal activity in the PIL of mice exposed to a novel social stimulus, a novel object stimulus, or no stimulus...

BACKGROUND: The posterior intralaminar (PIL) complex of the thalamus is a multimodal nucleus that has been implicated in maternal behaviors and conspecific social behaviors in male and female rodents. Glutamatergic neurons are a major component of the PIL; however, their specific activity and role during social interactions has not yet been assessed. METHODS: We used immunohistochemistry for the immediate early gene c-fos as a proxy for neuronal activity in the PIL of mice exposed to a novel social stimulus, a novel object stimulus, or no stimulus...

The dorsal striatum (DS) mediates the selection of actions for reward acquisition necessary for survival. Striatal pathology contributes to several neuropsychiatric conditions, including aberrant selection of actions for specific rewards in addiction. A major source of glutamate driving striatal activity is the rostral intralaminar nuclei (rILN) of the thalamus. Yet, the information that is relayed to the striatum to support action selection is unknown. Here, we discovered that rILN neurons projecting to the DS are innervated by a range of cortical and subcortical afferents and that rILN→DS neurons stably signaled at two time points in mice performing an action sequence task reinforced by sucrose reward: action initiation and reward acquisition...

Although the thalamus is perceived as a passive relay station for almost all sensory signals, the function of individual thalamic nuclei remains unresolved. In the present study, we aimed to identify the sensorimotor nuclei of the thalamus in humans using task-based fMRI at a field strength of 9.4T by assessing the individual subject-specific sensorimotor BOLD response during a combined active motor (finger-tapping) and passive sensory (tactile-finger) stimulation. We demonstrate that both tasks increase BOLD signal response in the lateral nuclei group (VPL, VA, VLa, and VLp), and in the pulvinar nuclei group (PuA, PuM, and PuL)...

Cerebellar-thalamo-striatal synaptic communication has been implicated in a wide range of behaviors, including goal-directed actions, and is altered in cerebellar dystonia. However, its detailed connectivity through the thalamus and its contribution to the execution of forelimb movements is unclear. Here, we use trans-synaptic and retrograde tracing, ex vivo slice recordings, and optogenetic inhibitions during the execution of unidirectional or sequential joystick displacements to demonstrate that the deep cerebellar nuclei (DCN) influence the dorsal striatum with a very high probability...

The orbital cortex (ORB) of the rat consists of five divisions: the medial (MO), ventral (VO), ventrolateral (VLO), lateral (LO), and dorsolateral (DLO) orbital cortices. No previous report has comprehensively examined and compared projections from each division of the ORB to the thalamus. Using the anterograde anatomical tracer, Phaseolus vulgaris leucoagglutinin, we describe the efferent projections from the five divisions of the ORB to the thalamus in the rat. We demonstrated that, with some overlap, each division of the ORB distributed in a distinct (and unique) manner to nuclei of the thalamus...