Psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder, are associated with sleep disturbances and deficits in memory consolidation; however, the relationship between these symptoms remains unclear. Here, we focused on hippocampal sharp-wave ripples (SWRs), a form of transient high-frequency oscillations that occur during sleep and behavioral immobility and contribute to memory consolidation. We activated the maternal immune system with polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid (poly(I : C)), one of the major pharmacological models of psychiatric disorders, to investigate whether SWR activity is altered in acute slices of the hippocampus from offspring born to poly(I : C)-treated mouse dams. Using robust continuous clustering in a low dimensional space defined by a uniform manifold approximation and projection, we found that mice with prenatal exposure to poly(I : C) exhibited different feature distributions of SWR waveforms without affecting the overall frequencies of SWR events. Based on our results, maternal immune activation leads to altered SWR patterns in offspring.
Keywords: autism; development; hippocampus; infection; sharp wave.