The grid cell network in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) has been subject to thorough testing and analysis, and many theories for their formation have been suggested. To test some of these theories, we re-analyzed data from Bonnevie et al., 2013, in which the hippocampus was inactivated and grid cells were recorded in the rat MEC. We investigated whether the firing associations of grid cells depend on hippocampal inputs. Specifically, we examined temporal and spatial correlations in the firing times of simultaneously recorded grid cells before and during hippocampal inactivation. Our analysis revealed evidence of network coherence in grid cells even in the absence of hippocampal input to the MEC, both in regular grid cells and in those that became head-direction cells after hippocampal inactivation. This favors models, which suggest that phase relations between grid cells in the MEC are dependent on intrinsic connectivity within the MEC.

Data was originally collected for the following paper:

Bonnevie T, Dunn B, Fyhn M, Hafting T, Derdikman D, Kubie JL, Roudi Y, Moser EI, Moser MB. Grid cells require excitatory drive from the hippocampus. Nature neuroscience. 2013 Mar;16(3):309

We have used Matlab to read and analyze the data.

The cells are uploaded as Matlab .mat files.

We will supply code on Github for reading this data.

(the link will be given in our published paper).