Park, Geunhong Shin, Wooyeon Park, Yongjun Chung, Sooyoung Kim, Daesoo Kim, Jeongjin 2024-01-19T12:33:57Z 2024-01-19T12:33:57Z 2022-04-03 2022-02 0006-291X https://pubs.kist.re.kr/handle/201004/115672 The parafascicular nucleus (Pf) in medial thalamus is interconnected with prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. Though much research has determined its importance in cognitive regulation of behaviour, its projections to regions in subthalamus remain less known. Such connections include those to zona incerta (ZI), located immediately dorsal to subthalamic nuclei (STN) regulating motor output, and whose role in a motor context is only beginning to be investigated. We thus examined circuits from parafascicular (Pf) thalamus to ZI, and its activity during locomotion and spontaneous behaviours in mice. We found that a distinct group of CaMKIIa-positive excitatory parafascicular neurons, separated from VGLUT2-positive excitatory neurons, project widely into ZI, more than adjacent STN. Our results from fibre photometry and decoding with general linear model (GLM) indicate that PF-ZI pathways do not specifically correlate with amount of locomotion or movement velocity, but instead show more specified activity during relative directional changes of movements observed in turning, sniffing behaviours. These results hint at the PF-ZI pathway having a distinct role in directing action specificity and have implications for subcortical bases in dimensional control of behaviours. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc. English Academic Press Neural correlates of multidimensional motor outputs in an excitatory parafascicular-zona incerta circuit Article 10.1016/j.bbrc.2021.12.036 1 Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, v.591, pp.102 - 109 Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 591 102 109 N scie scopus 000768235200002 2-s2.0-85123188549 Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Biophysics Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Biophysics Article DEEP BRAIN-STIMULATION THALAMIC NUCLEUS NEURONS PROJECTIONS SIGNALS INDUCE Parafascicular nucleus Zona incerta Subthalamus Motor preparation Direction coding Intralaminar thalamus