Lactate transporters in the rat barrel cortex sustain whisker-dependent BOLD fMRI signal and behavioral performance.

Lactate is an efficient neuronal energy source, even in presence of glucose. However, the importance of lactate shuttling between astrocytes and neurons for brain activation and function remains to be established. For this purpose, metabolic and hemodynamic responses to sensory stimulation have been measured by functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy and blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI after down-regulation of either neuronal MCT2 or astroglial MCT4 in the rat barrel cortex. Results show that the lactate rise in the barrel cortex upon whisker stimulation is abolished when either transporter is down-regulated. Under the same paradigm, the BOLD response is prevented in all MCT2 down-regulated rats, while about half of the MCT4 down-regulated rats exhibited a loss of the BOLD response. Interestingly, MCT4 down-regulated animals showing no BOLD response were rescued by peripheral lactate infusion, while this treatment had no effect on MCT2 down-regulated rats. When animals were tested in a novel object recognition task, MCT2 down-regulated animals were impaired in the textured but not in the visual version of the task. For MCT4 down-regulated animals, while all animal succeeded in the visual task, half of them exhibited a deficit in the textured task, a similar segregation into two groups as observed for BOLD experiments. Our data demonstrate that lactate shuttling between astrocytes and neurons is essential to give rise to both neurometabolic and neurovascular couplings, which form the basis for the detection of brain activation by functional brain imaging techniques. Moreover, our results establish that this metabolic cooperation is required to sustain behavioral performance based on cortical activation.