title: Whole-Brain Monosynaptic Afferent Inputs to Basal Forebrain Cholinergic System.
abstract: The basal forebrain cholinergic system (BFCS) robustly modulates many important behaviors, such as arousal, attention, learning and memory, through heavy projections to cortex and hippocampus. However, the presynaptic partners governing BFCS activity still remain poorly understood. Here, we utilized a recently developed rabies virus-based cell-type-specific retrograde tracing system to map the whole-brain afferent inputs of the BFCS. We found that the BFCS receives inputs from multiple cortical areas, such as orbital frontal cortex, motor cortex, and insular cortex, and that the BFCS also receives dense inputs from several subcortical nuclei related to motivation and stress, including lateral septum, central amygdala, paraventricular nucleus of hypothalamus, dorsal raphe, and parabrachial nucleus. Interestingly, we found that the BFCS receives inputs from the olfactory areas and the entorhinal-hippocampal system. These results greatly expand our knowledge about the connectivity of the mouse BFCS and provided important preliminary indications for future exploration of circuit function.
authors: Center for Neuron and Disease, Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, China.
authors: Rongfeng
authors: R
authors: Hu
authors: Center for Excellence in Brain Science, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Wuhan, China.
authors: Sen
authors: S
authors: Jin
authors: Center for Excellence in Brain Science, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Wuhan, China.
authors: Xiaobin
authors: X
authors: He
authors: Center for Excellence in Brain Science, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Wuhan, China.
authors: Fuqiang
authors: F
authors: Xu
authors: School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University Shanghai, China.
authors: Ji
authors: J
authors: Hu
keywords: basal forebrain cholinergic system; learning and memory; monosynaptic inputs; rabies viruses; whole-brain mapping