Dominant activities of fear engram cells in the dorsal dentate gyrus underlie fear generalization in mice.

ABSTRACT: Over-generalized fear is a maladaptive response to harmless stimuli or situations characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other anxiety disorders. The dorsal dentate gyrus (dDG) contains engram cells that play a crucial role in accurate memory retrieval. However, the coordination mechanism of neuronal subpopulations within the dDG network during fear generalization is not well understood. Here, with the Tet-off system combined with immunostaining and two-photon calcium imaging, we report that dDG fear engram cells labeled in the conditioned context constitutes a significantly higher proportion of dDG neurons activated in a similar context where mice show generalized fear. The activation of these dDG fear engram cells encoding the conditioned context is both sufficient an

SUBMITTER: Cui K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11244812 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature