Vikaas Sohal

LEGO mouse labyrinth so actually awesome x2

Please come by the Sohal lab posters at #SfN2025 to join the discussion about all of our favorite things: cognitive flexibility, gamma oscillations, PFC social encoding, autism mouse models, dopamine, & more!

Circuit inhibition promotes the dynamic reorganization of prefrontal task encoding to support cognitive flexibility The mammalian prefrontal cortex encodes variables related to goal-directed behavior, and enables flexibility during environmental changes, making it critical to understand how the dynamic updating vs....

The second, led by Carlos Johnson-Cruz, compares PFC Ca2+ imaging in normal mice vs. mutants with reversible cognitive deficits. Task encoding (including outcome-encoding) normally reorganizes as mice learn new rules but becomes abnormally stable during perseveration: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This work, made possible through a collaboration with the Schnitzer lab, shows that gamma oscillations are not unitary phenomena characterized by a microcircuit-wide pattern of entrainment, but rather comprise diverse motifs that are flexibly recruited to subserve specific behavioral functions.

Prefrontal gamma oscillations engage dynamic cell type-specific configurations to support flexible behavior Cognitive dysfunction in conditions such as schizophrenia involves disrupted communication between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and mediodorsal thalamus (MD). Parvalbumin interneurons (PVI) are known t...

Two preprints up! The first, led by Aarron Phensy, uses red+green voltage indicators to show that prefrontal gamma oscillations dynamically engage various cell types, creating multiple synchrony configurations, each tied to a distinct aspect of cognitive flexibility: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Context-invariant socioemotional encoding by prefrontal ensembles - Nature Communications How the ensemble encoding of social and anxiety-related behaviors interacts with encoding of context in the prefrontal cortex of mice is not fully understood. Here authors examine how prefrontal neurons encode socioemotional behaviors in different contexts and reveal that the prefrontal cortex encodes context-invariant representations of these behaviors in parallel with representations of context.

(more news) New paper just published! Prefrontal representations of social and emotional information generalize across contexts (even though ensembles for socioemotional + contextual information are highly overlapping): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Synaptic plasticity of prefrontal long-range inhibition regulates cognitive flexibility While glutamatergic synaptic plasticity is believed to be a fundamental mechanism mediating learning, the behavioral significance of plasticity at cortical GABAergic synapses remains less well underst...

New work! Learning is assumed to involve synaptic plasticity, but which specific synapses change to enable higher order cognitive functions? We actually find that cognitive flexibility involves potentiation of long-range GABAergic synapses from prefrontal PV neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Understanding Complex Systems: Leveraging a Background in Math to Tackle Problems in Psychiatry <p>This session will describe the speaker&rsquo;s journey from studying math in college to performing some of the first experiments using optogenetics, training as a psychiatrist, and leading a neuros...

One more post while I'm at it: my 'Meet-the-Clincian-Expert' @neuronline.sfn.org talk, describing my lab's work plus my career path, is now available on demand: neuronline.sfn.org/scientific-r...

This was followed by @viditavaidya.bsky.social hosting me at the legendary HutmentLab @tifrscience.bsky.social. It was super cool to see @rhythmicspikes.bsky.social's new lab at NCBS, before finishing my “tour” with Laxmi Rao at NIMHANS. Thanks all for this incredibly meaningful visit! 2/2

Also while I’m posting on BlueSky for the first time, I want to thank to several folks for hosting me last month on a journey where I got to connect with neuroscience in India. First I got to participate in a great symposium on autism and visit Sourav Banerjee’s lab at the NBRC near Delhi. 1/2

Finally, LiCl treatment, which we and the Rubenstein lab previously found rescues synaptic and behavioral abnormalities in Tbr1 cKO mice, also seems to reverse at least some of the observed abnormalities in neural activity. 4/n

Similar to our prior finding from Shank3 KO mice, multineuron coordination within social ensembles is diminished in Tbr1 cKO mice. The inability of neurons to act synergistically in order to encode social information via correlated activity may be a convergent feature of diverse autism models. 3/n

Using neural network classifiers, we found PFC social ensembles that undergo re- (and pre-) activation, plus ensembles which predict approach/avoidance decisions. These signals are all lost in Tbr1 cKO mice. 2/n

Loss of the autism associated gene Tbr1 disrupts prediction and encoding by prefrontal ensembles during socioemotional behaviors Disruptions in many genes linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affect synaptic function and socioemotional behaviors in mice. However, exactly how synaptic dysfunction alters neural activity patte...

New work online! Led by Marc Turner in collaboration with the Rubenstein lab. We studied how disruptions in autism genes alter neural activity to produce abnormal behavior in layer 5 Tbr1 cKO mice, & in the process, found new aspects of PFC socioemotional encoding 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share our new paper out now @natureportfolio.bsky.social, where we identified neural signatures of stress susceptibility and resilience in the amygdala-ventral hippocampal network to enable control of anhedonia! <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08241-y>

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