ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neural Circuits
This article is part of the Research TopicHow we visually encode and remember our environmentView all articles
Evidence of spatial periodic firing in the subiculum of mice
Provisionally accepted
Pablo Abad-Pérez1,2,3,4Giulia Rigamonti1,2,3
Francisco Javier Molina Payá1,2,3Miram Seve-Castello1
Ricardo Scott5
Victor Borrell2,3
Luis M Martinez2
Antonio Falco1
Jorge R. Brotons-Mas1,2,3*- 1Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera, Valencia, Spain
- 2Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante, Sant Joan d'Alacant, Spain
- 3Grupo de Investigación Multidisciplinar en la enfermedad de Alzheimer UMH-UCHCEU, Alicante, Spain
- 4Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mediques, Barcelona, Spain
- 5Universitat d'Alacant, Sant Vicent del Raspeig, Spain
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The subiculum is a critical node of the hippocampal formation, integrating multiple circuits—including thalamic inputs and afferents from CA1 and medial entorhinal cortex—and projecting broadly to cortical and subcortical targets. Yet its contribution to spatial coding remains incompletely understood. We recorded single units in freely moving mice using two complementary approaches: (i) chronic tetrodes targeting CA1 and dorsal SUB, and (ii) 64-channel linear silicon probes targeting dorsal SUB. In addition to place cells, boundary-vector cells (BVC) and corner cells (CC), we identified a subset of SUB neurons that exhibited spatially periodic (grid-like) firing. This phenomenon was replicated across recording technologies indicating that periodic coding is a consistent feature of mouse subiculum. Compared with CA1 place cells, SUB spatial neurons showed lower spatial information and reduced within-session stability, suggesting distinct coding regimes across these hippocampal subregions. Sampling along the proximodistal axis with probe arrays further revealed that burst propensity correlated positively with spatial information at more distal recording sites, consistent with known physiological gradients in subiculum and echoing relationships seen in CA1. Together, these results expand the repertoire of identified spatial codes in SUB and support a view in which subiculum contributes to geometry-and periodicity-based representations that complement CA1 and entorhinal spatial representation, thus, shaping downstream computations in cortico-subcortical circuits.
Keywords: subiculum, Spatial Coding, grid-like firing, Place Cells, boundary-vector cells, corner cells, bursting, proximodistal gradient
Received: 17 Jun 2025; Accepted: 21 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Abad-Pérez, Rigamonti, Molina Payá, Seve-Castello, Scott, Borrell, Martinez, Falco and Brotons-Mas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jorge R. Brotons-Mas, brotonsj@gmail.com
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