March 3, 2026Open Access

Complementary cortical and thalamic contributions to cell type–specific striatal activity dynamics during movement

Puntos clave

Cell-type specific activation of dMSNs occurs at movement onset and offset, while iMSNs are active during movement execution.
Functional analysis identified heterogeneous subpopulations within dMSNs and iMSNs, with inputs from cortex and thalamus linked to movement phases.
Data collection involved monosynaptic rabies tracing to identify specific cell inputs and RNN classifiers for activity analysis.
Inactivation of cortex or thalamus resulted in diminished activity of medium spiny neurons, highlighting their role in locomotion.

Resumen

Coordinated motor behavior emerges from information flow across brain regions. How long-range inputs drive cell type-specific activity within motor circuits remains unclear. The dorsolateral striatum (DLS) contains direct- and indirect-pathway medium spiny neurons (dMSNs and iMSNs) with distinct roles in movement control. In mice performing skilled locomotion, we recorded from dMSNs, iMSNs, and their cortical and thalamic inputs identified by monosynaptic rabies tracing. A recurrent neural network (RNN) classifier and clustering analysis revealed functionally heterogeneous subpopulations in each population, with dMSNs preferentially activated at movement onset and offset, and iMSNs during execution. Cortical and thalamic inputs were preferentially activated during onset/offset and execution, respectively, though dMSN- and iMSN-projecting neurons in each region showed similar patterns. Locomotion phase-specific rhythmic activity was found in a subset of thalamic dMSN-projecting neurons and dMSNs. Cortex or thalamus inactivation reduced MSN activity. These findings suggest that corticostriatal and thalamostriatal inputs convey complementary motor signals via shared and cell type-specific pathways.

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