Does dorsolateral striatum use cerebellar motor state predictions to guide rapid and complex movement?

I will examine the function of a newly-discovered pathway stretching from the cerebellum, via the intralaminar thalamic nuclei, to the striatum.

The cerebellum and the striatum are heavily implicated in motor control in health and disease, but were thought to principally interact through cortex. The discovery of this cortex-bypassing pathway implies that the structures interact in unexpected and significant ways.

Here, I hypothesize that the motor striatum uses cerebellar "body state" predictions to supplement or even substitute slower and sparser "actual" sensory and proprioceptive signals, transported from the periphery, when generating movement.

This would be especially useful when learning and controlling very fast, skilled movements, i.e. when reafferent sensory feedback arrives too late and is too sparse to guide striatum-controlled, ongoing movement.

To test my hypothesis, I will employ an established -- and confirmed motor striatum-dependent -- motor control behavioral task, in combination with state-of-the-art, pathway-specific inactivation (DREADDs) and neural activity recording (electrophysiology, optotagging) techniques, in rats.

The research will be conducted at the laboratory of Professor Bence Ölveczky at Harvard University in Cambridge (MA) in the USA, and the grant will be administered by Professor Marie Carlén at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.