Brain-wide maps of Fos expression during fear learning and recall

Abstract

induction during learning labels neuronal ensembles in the hippocampus that encode a specific physical environment, revealing a memory trace. In the cortex and other regions, the extent to which induction during learning reveals specific sensory representations is unknown. Here we generate high-quality brain-wide maps of mRNA expression during auditory fear conditioning and recall in the setting of the home cage. These maps reveal a brain-wide pattern of induction that is remarkably similar among fear conditioning, shock-only, tone-only, and fear recall conditions, casting doubt on the idea that reveals auditory-specific sensory representations. Indeed, novel auditory tones lead to as much gene induction in visual as in auditory cortex, while familiar (nonconditioned) tones do not appreciably induce anywhere in the brain. expression levels do not correlate with physical activity, suggesting that they are not determined by behavioral activity-driven alterations in sensory experience. In the thalamus, is induced more prominently in limbic than in sensory relay nuclei, suggesting that may be most sensitive to emotional state. Thus, our data suggest that expression during simple associative learning labels ensembles activated generally by arousal rather than specifically by a particular sensory cue.

Involvement of the lateral habenula in fear memory

“…First, the factorial analysis conducted in the NS and FC conditions led to different distributions of the investigated structure among factors. This indicates that even though neuronal activations were observed in the same structures in both conditions, as expected by the fact that all rats were exposed to novelty (see Milanovic et al 1998;Radulovic et al 1998;Cho et al 2017), the onset of functional associations in these networks can be unraveled through correlational analysis of data. Specifically, the analysis of the FC group led to the extraction of 3 factors gathering neuronal ensembles classically described as sustaining different facets of information processing during fear conditioning.…”

Ultrafast immunostaining of organ-scale tissues for scalable proteomic phenotyping

“…3g-i). Examination of the dataset showed robust anti-c-Fos signal in hippocampus and amygdala areas, which are known to show increased activity upon contextual fear conditioning 26 . Combined, these results suggest that eFLASH-mediated immunolabeling can facilitate brain-wide quantification of protein expression at a cellular level in a high throughput and flexible manner.…”

Leveraging Neural Networks in Preclinical Alcohol Research

“…An unbiased approach to examine whole-brain neural activity by light-sheet fluorescent imaging of immunostained and optically cleared tissue has recently been developed (iDISCO) and used to uncover brain regions differentially activated during parenting behavior [ 145 , 146 ]. Another approach identified brain-wide maps of Fos mRNA expression during auditory fear conditioning to reveal patterns of Fos induction that are similar among shock-only and tone-only fear conditioning and fear recall conditions, suggesting simple associative learning ensembles that are activated by arousal rather than by a specific sensory cue [ 216 ].…”