Differential effects of visual and tactile deprivation on spatially modulated cells in the medial entorhinal cortex

Spatial navigation requires internal maps to remain anchored to external sensory cues. The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) contains spatially modulated cell types, but how visual and tactile cues jointly support them is unclear. Here we show, using miniature two-photon calcium imaging in freely moving male mice, that sensory deprivation has context-dependent effects.

In a visually dominated environment, darkness disrupted all spatially modulated cell types, especially grid and non-grid spatial representations; subsequent whisker trimming had limited additional effects, but more clearly altered head-direction and border-cell tuning. In darkness with salient tactile landmarks, all spatially modulated cell types formed cue-anchored representations, and whisker trimming more strongly impaired grid and spatial coding. Some neurons remained stable after combined deprivation, consistent with support from boundary-related tactile signals.

Additionally, a subset of MEC neurons showed activity correlated with whisker movement. These findings reveal flexible integration of visual and tactile information in MEC spatial coding. We are grateful to the National Center for Protein Sciences at Peking University in Beijing, China, for their support with imaging and histology.

We thank Emilio Kropff, Xiang Zhang and Meng Zhong for their invaluable guidance on experiment techniques and data processing during the early stages of this project. This research was funded by the Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of Beijing (JQ23023; C.M.), the Qidong-SLS Innovation Fund (2023002029 and 2020001540; C.M.), the Space Brain Project of Lingang Laboratory (Grant No. LG-TKN-202204-01; C.M.), the Chinese Government Foreign Expert Project for Emilio Kropff (G2022101003L; C.M.), and the PICT-2019-2596 grant from the Argentine Ministry of Science (E.K.).

State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China Jiayi Tian, Shidan Wen, Yuqian Zhou, Nan Hu, Shuyang Yao, Xuan Zhang, Yuanjing Liu, Yuheng He, Zhouyuan Wang & Chenglin Miao Peking University-International Data Group/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, China Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Beijing, China Xuan Zhang, Zhouyuan Wang & Chenglin Miao Peking University-Tsinghua University-National Institute of Biological Sciences Joint Graduate Program, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing, China Peking University Chengdu Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Biotechnologies, Chengdu, China The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.

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