Hippocampal off-line reactivation consolidates recently formed cell assembly patterns during sharp-wave/ripples

The ability to reinstate neuronal assemblies representing mnemonic information is thought to require their consolidation through off-line reactivation during sleep/rest. To test this, we detected cell assembly-patterns formed by repeated neuronal coactivations in the mouse hippocampus during exploration of spatial environments. We found that the reinstatement of assembly-patterns representing a novel, but not a familiar, environment correlated with their off-line reactivation and was impaired by closed-loop optogenetic disruption of sharp-wave/ripple oscillations. Moreover, we discovered that reactivation was only required for the reinstatement of assemblypatterns whose expression was gradually strengthened during encoding of a novel place. The context-dependent reinstatement of assembly-patterns whose expression did not gain in strength beyond the first few minutes of spatial encoding was not dependent on reactivation. This demonstrates that the hippocampus can hold concurrent representations of space that markedly differ in their encoding dynamics and their dependence on off-line reactivation for consolidation