Working memory (WM) enables the temporary maintenance and manipulation of sensory information to guide behavior, yet the neural circuits supporting this process remain incompletely defined. The claustrum is a highly interconnected brain structure positioned to integrate distributed cortical activity, but its contribution to WM has remained unclear. Here, we combined microendoscopic calcium imaging, chemogenetic and optogenetic manipulations in mice performing sensory-guided WM tasks to examine the role of the claustrum in WM.
Claustrum neurons exhibited cue-evoked activity that persisted across delay periods and evolved dynamically over time, with population states retaining information about cue identity on single trials. Reducing claustrum excitability during encoding, delay maintenance, or target comparison similarly impaired WM performance across sensory modalities, without affecting sensory processing, motor output, arousal or inhibitory control. Together, these findings reveal an important causal contribution of the claustrum to WM maintenance.
We thank members of A.C. and I.R. laboratories for helpful discussions and/or comments on the manuscript. We thank Sébastien Pellat, Elodie Husi, Chenda Kan, Véronique Jungo, Alex Ameixa and Loris Mannino for expert technical assistance. This research was supported by the University of Geneva and the European Research Council (contract ERC-SyG-856439-CLAUSTROFUNCT to A.C. and I.R.), the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 310030_215572 to A.C.), the Novartis foundation for medical research (A.C. and I.R.) and the Copley May foundation (A.C.).
Open access funding provided by University of Geneva. These authors jointly supervised this work: Ivan Rodriguez, Alan Carleton. Department of Basic Neurosciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, 1 rue Michel-Servet, Geneva, Switzerland Anindya S.
Bhattacharjee, Maxime Juventin, Chieko Huber, Burak Unsal, Jean-Rodolphe Renfer & Alan Carleton Department of Genetics and Evolution, Faculty of Sciences, University of Geneva, quai Ernest-Ansermet, Geneva, Switzerland Chieko Huber, Burak Unsal, Jean-Rodolphe Renfer & Ivan Rodriguez Correspondence to Ivan Rodriguez or Alan Carleton. The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
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