OSCR

Prefrontal-thalamic goal states organize spatially aligned hippocampal maps.

Overview

Authors: Zahra Golipour1, Marjan Mozaffarilegha1,2, Shao-Fan Yen1, Cansu Üstüner1, Hiroshi T Ito1,2
ORCID iDs: Shao-Fan Yen, Cansu Üstüner, Hiroshi T Ito
  1. Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
  2. Department of Fundamental Neurosciences, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Institutions: Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (Germany); University of Lausanne (Switzerland)
Journal: Nature communications, volume 17, issue 1, article 9233
Dates: received 17 February 2026; accepted 19 August 2026; published online 29 August 2026
Type: Research article · Language: English
License: CC BY
Identifiers: DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-77240-6 · PMID 42668299 · PMCID PMC13526029 · OpenAlex W7204651862
Open access: gold, a free copy (OpenAlex)
Status: code on request
Categories: rat (organism), systems (subfield)
Methods: Spectral & time-frequency, Statistics, Smoothing, state filtering, decompositions, Machine learning, Preprocessing, Evoked potentials, Single-unit activity, calcium imaging
Keywords: Hippocampus, Neural circuits
MeSH: CA1 Region, Hippocampal*, Goals*, Hippocampus*, Midline Thalamic Nuclei*, Prefrontal Cortex*, Thalamus*, Animals, Brain Mapping, Locomotion, Male, Maze Learning, Rats, Rats, Long-Evans, Spatial Navigation (* major topic)
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms (Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroscience), according to OpenAlex
Funding: European Research Council (714642, 101087404)
Citations: not cited yet (Europe PMC); 73 references in the paper

Abstract

Animals repeatedly traverse the same environment to pursue different goals, yet the hippocampus must preserve a stable spatial map while keeping individual experiences distinct. Here we show that, when male rats navigate the same maze under different goal configurations, hippocampal CA1 segregates navigation experiences by encoding goal state along a population dimension largely orthogonal to the spatial coding subspace, allowing goal-configuration-specific maps to remain spatially aligned. This goal-state signal is also represented in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and nucleus reuniens (NR), where population activity forms persistent representations across locomotion and immobility and is reliably reinstated when previously experienced goal configurations recur. Silencing NR reduces CA1 goal-state coding, diminishing goal-axis separation and goal-biased pre-navigation spike sequences while sparing spatial coding. Together, these findings identify a circuit- and population-level mechanism that enables goal-defined hippocampal representations to coexist within spatially aligned maps independent of locomotor state, linking internal goal states to navigation and planning.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper says that its authors' code is available on request: it was not published with the paper, so there is nothing to verify.

Code availability

The analyses were performed using standard software packages described in the Methods. Custom code used for the analyses is available from the corresponding author upon request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Tracing map

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Data

No dataset and no data link were found in the paper.

Data availability

Source data are provided with this paper. Additional raw data are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

The history of this record: each version stored by the harvester or made by a correction of its authors or of the maintainers of its code, and what changed in its facts. The texts of the paper (its abstract, its availability statements) are not part of it; versions that changed only those are not listed.

Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 5 authors, 2 keywords, 14 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 71 references.

Cite

This paper

Golipour, Z., Mozaffarilegha, M., Yen, S.-F., Üstüner, C., & Ito, H. T. (2026). Prefrontal-thalamic goal states organize spatially aligned hippocampal maps. Nature communications, 17(1), 9233. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77240-6

BibTeX

@article{golipour2026prefrontal,
author = {Golipour, Zahra and Mozaffarilegha, Marjan and Yen, Shao-Fan and Üstüner, Cansu and Ito, Hiroshi T},
title = {{Prefrontal-thalamic goal states organize spatially aligned hippocampal maps}},
journal = {Nature communications},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
volume = {17},
number = {1},
pages = {9233},
publisher = {Nature Publishing Group},
issn = {2041-1723},
doi = {10.1038/s41467-026-77240-6},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77240-6},
pmid = {42668299},
pmcid = {PMC13526029}
}

RIS

TY - JOUR
AU - Golipour, Zahra
AU - Mozaffarilegha, Marjan
AU - Yen, Shao-Fan
AU - Üstüner, Cansu
AU - Ito, Hiroshi T
TI - Prefrontal-thalamic goal states organize spatially aligned hippocampal maps
T2 - Nature communications
J2 - Nat Commun
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/29
VL - 17
IS - 1
SP - 9233
SN - 2041-1723
PB - Nature Publishing Group
DO - 10.1038/s41467-026-77240-6
UR - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77240-6
LA - en
ER -

CSL-JSON

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