Cortical GABAergic inhibition dynamics around hippocampal sharp-wave ripples

Cortical inhibition, mediated by GABA, is essential in balancing excitation and modulating neural processing, but it is unclear to what extent inhibitory dynamics are responsive to internally generated hippocampal activity, such as sharp-wave ripples (SWRs). Employing widefield imaging of extracellular GABA with iGABASnFR2 and hippocampal recordings, we characterized cortical inhibition during sleep–awake states and in the neighborhood of SWRs. Sleep–awake transitions drastically reorganized cortical levels of GABA, with increased inhibition in wakefulness and decreased upon entering NREM sleep. In the neighborhood of SWRs, inhibition was state- and region-specific: during NREM, medial cortices (e.g., retrosplenial) increased GABA before SWRs, whereas sensory areas in the lateral cortices decreased it; during wake, GABA increased in lateral cortices after SWRs. These findings reveal that cortical inhibition is not static and ubiquitous but instead is dynamically characterized by brain state, orchestrating the flow of hippocampal outputs to the rest of the cortex. Inhibitory modulation, as our data reveal, forms a mechanism allowing selective gating of memory-related activity during wakefulness and sleep.