Oxytocin promotes prefrontal population activity via the PVN-PFC pathway to regulate pain.

Neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) can provide top-down regulation of sensory-affective experiences such as pain. Bottom-up modulation of sensory coding in the PFC, however, remains poorly understood. Here, we examined how oxytocin (OT) signaling from the hypothalamus regulates nociceptive coding in the PFC. In vivo time-lapse endoscopic calcium imaging in freely behaving rats showed that OT selectively enhanced population activity in the prelimbic PFC in response to nociceptive inputs. This population response resulted from the reduction of evoked GABAergic inhibition and manifested as elevated functional connectivity involving pain-responsive neurons. Direct inputs from OT-releasing neurons in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of the hypothalamus are crucial to maintaining this prefrontal nociceptive response. Activation of the prelimbic PFC by OT or direct optogenetic stimulation of oxytocinergic PVN projections reduced acute and chronic pain. These results suggest that oxytocinergic signaling in the PVN-PFC circuit constitutes a key mechanism to regulate cortical sensory processing.

Long-term decoding stability of local field potentials from silicon arrays in primate motor cortex during a 2D center out task.

OBJECTIVE: Many serious concerns exist in the long-term stability of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) based on spike signals (single unit activity, SUA; multi unit activity, MUA). Some studies showed local field potentials (LFPs) could offer a stable decoding performance. However, the decoding stability of LFPs was examined only when high quality spike signals were recorded. Here we aim to examine the long-term decoding stability of LFPs over a larger time scale when the quality of spike signals was from good to poor or even no spike was recorded. APPROACH: Neural signals were collected from motor cortex of three monkeys via silicon arrays over 230, 290 and 690 days post-implantation when they performed 2D center out task. To compare long-term stability between LFPs and spike signals, we examined them in neural signals characteristics, directional tuning properties and offline decoding performance, respectively. MAIN RESULTS: We observed slow decreasing trends in the number of LFP channels recorded and mean LFP power in different frequency bands when spike signals quality decayed over time. The number of significantly directional tuning LFP channels decreased more slowly than that of tuning SUA and MUA. The variable preferred directions for the same signal features across sessions indicated non-stationarity of neural activity. We also found that LFPs achieved better decoding performance than SUA and MUA in retrained decoder when the quality of spike signals seriously decayed. Especially, when no spike was recorded in one monkey after 671 days post-implantation, LFPs still provided some kinematic information. In addition, LFPs outperformed MUA in long-term decoding stability in a static decoder. SIGNIFICANCE: Our results suggested that LFPs were more durable and could provide better decoding performance when spike signals quality seriously decayed. It might be due to their resistance to recording degradation and their high redundancy among channels.