A widely used rabies virus (RV)-mediated retrograde monosynaptic tracing strategy was adopted to reveal the input neurons of CB+/CR+ neurons in the nonlemniscal auditory thalamus (From BrainVTA)

Tracing Helper	PT-0165 AAV-DIO-EGFP-TVA  PT-0023 AAV-DIO-RG
RV	R01002 SADΔG-DsRed RV

Dongqin Cai, Yin Yue, Xin Su, Miaomiao Liu, Yiwei Wang, Ling You, Fenghua Xie, Fei Deng, Feng Chen, Minmin Luo and Kexin Yuan
Pub Date: 2018-05-04,  DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhy115, Email: [email protected]
Systematic examination of the inputs and outputs of the nonlemniscal auditory thalamus will facilitate the functional elucidation of this complex structure in the central auditory system. In mice, comprehensive tracing studies that reveal the long-range connectivity of the nonlemniscal auditory thalamus are lacking. To this end, we used Cre-inducible anterograde and monosynaptic retrograde viruses in Calbindin-2A-dgCre-D and Calretinin-IRES-Cre mice, focusing on the differences across subdivisions of the nonlemniscal auditory thalamus. We found that, 1) the dorsal and medial parts of the auditory thalamus were predominantly connected to sensory processing centers, whereas the posterior intralaminar (PIN) and peripeduncular nucleus (PP) were additionally connected to emotion and motivation modulation centers; 2) ventral auditory cortical areas were the major source of cortical inputs for all subdivisions, and the PIN/PP received more inputs from cortical layer 5 than other subdivisions did; 3) deep layers of the superior colliculus and rostral part of the nonlemniscal inferior colliculus preferentially projected to the PIN/PP; and 4) compared with the dorsal auditory thalamus, the PIN/PP mainly innervated association cortices. In addition, new brain areas connected to the nonlemniscal auditory thalamus, mostly the PIN/PP, were identified. Our results suggested subdivision-specific function of the nonlemniscal auditory thalamus in sound processing.