Dr. Jose Guzmán

The Funcional Microcircuit of Pattern Completion in the Hippocampal CA3 Network

The second (and last) speaker in the afternoon was Dr. Jose Guzmán from the Institute of Science and Technology (Klosterneuburg, Austria) whose lecture was entitled "The Functional Microcircuit of Pattern Completion in the Hippocampal CA3 Network". Within the hippocampal circuit, different regions have been assigned distinct roles in the encoding and retrieval of memories. For example, the CA3 region of the hippocampus is endowed with an autoassociative network that allows for the recall of memory contents from partial or noisy cues, a process called pattern completion. Dr. Guzmán has now identified the synaptic mechanisms that underlie this important cognitive operation. Simultaneous recordings from eight CA3 neurons in the hippocampal slice preparation served to identify the prevailing motifs of synaptic connectivity in CA3 networks, which were mostly disynaptic in nature. When these motifs were implemented in real-size computational models of the CA3 region, they emerged as essential features to generate pattern completion.[1]

[1] Guzman S.J., Schlögl A., Frotscher M., Jonas P., Synaptic mechanisms of pattern completion in the hippocampal CA3 network. Science 353, 1117 (2016).