TY - JOUR T1 - Effects of optogenetic stimulation of primary somatosensory cortex and its projections to striatum on vibrotactile perception in freely moving rats JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0453-20.2021 SP - ENEURO.0453-20.2021 AU - Zongpeng Sun AU - Artur Schneider AU - Mansour Alyahyay AU - Golan Karvat AU - Ilka Diester Y1 - 2021/02/15 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2021/02/12/ENEURO.0453-20.2021.abstract N2 - Tactile sensation is one of our primary means to collect information about the nearby environment and thus crucial for daily activities and survival. Therefore, it is of high importance to restore sensory feedback after sensory loss. Optogenetic manipulation allows local or pathway specific write-in of information. However, it remains elusive whether optogenetic stimulation can be interpreted as tactile sensation to guide operant behavior and how it is integrated with tactile stimuli. To address these questions we employed a vibrotactile detection task combined with optogenetic neuromodulation in freely moving rats. By bidirectionally manipulating the activity of neurons in primary somatosensory cortex (S1), we demonstrated that optical activation as well as inhibition of S1 reduced the detection rate for vibrotactile stimuli. Interestingly, activation of corticostriatal terminals improved the detection of tactile stimuli, while inhibition of corticostriatal terminals did not affect the performance. To manipulate the corticostriatal pathway more specifically, we employed a dual viral system. Activation of corticostriatal cell bodies disturbed the tactile perception while activation of corticostriatal terminals slightly facilitated the detection of vibrotactile stimuli. In the absence of tactile stimuli, both corticostriatal cell bodies as well as terminals caused a reaction. Taken together, our data confirmed the possibility to restore sensation using optogenetics and demonstrated that S1 and its descending projections to striatum play differential roles in the neural processing underlying vibrotactile detection.Significance Statement The capability of writing-in information locally or pathway-specific makes optogenetic manipulation a promising approach to restore sensation. The extent to which the optogenetic stimulation can be interpreted as tactile sensation to guide operant behavior remains to be clarified. In this work we applied bidirectional manipulation of S1 and its striatal terminals as well as pathway-specific activations, and found that cortical manipulations disturbed the performance of vibrotactile stimuli. Corticostriatal terminal activation enhanced the performance in the presence of vibrotactile stimuli, while corticostriatal inhibition did not affect the performance. This study provides insights into the contributions of S1 and its descending projections to striatum to the neural processing underlying vibrotactile detection. ER -