In auditory fear conditioning, experimental subjects learn to associate an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) with an aversive unconditioned stimulus. With sufficient training, animals fear conditioned to an auditory CS show fear response to the CS, but not to irrelevant auditory stimuli. Although long-term potentiation (LTP) in the lateral amygdala (LA) plays an essential role in auditory fear conditioning, it is unknown whether LTP is induced selectively in the neural pathways conveying specific CS information to the LA in discriminative fear learning. Here, we show that postsynaptically expressed LTP is induced selectively in the CS-specific auditory pathways to the LA in a mouse model of auditory discriminative fear conditioning. Moreover, optogenetically induced depotentiation of the CS-specific auditory pathways to the LA suppressed conditioned fear responses to the CS. Our results suggest that input-specific LTP in the LA contributes to fear memory specificity, enabling adaptive fear responses only to the relevant sensory cue. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

中文翻译：

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通过杏仁核中输入特定的LTP对区分性恐惧记忆进行编码。

在听觉恐惧条件下，实验对象学会将听觉条件条件刺激（CS）与厌恶的无条件条件刺激相关联。经过足够的训练，动物对听觉CS的恐惧表现出对CS的恐惧反应，而不是对无关的听觉刺激的恐惧。尽管外侧杏仁核（LA）中的长期增强（LTP）在听觉恐惧调节中起着至关重要的作用，但尚不清楚在歧视性恐惧学习中，在将特定CS信息传递给LA的神经通路中是否选择性诱导了LTP。在这里，我们表明，在听觉歧视性恐惧条件的小鼠模型中，CS特异的听觉途径选择性地诱导了突触后表达的LTP到LA。而且，CS特异性听觉通路向LA的光遗传诱导的去势化抑制了对CS的条件恐惧反应。我们的结果表明，LA中输入特定的LTP有助于恐惧记忆的特异性，从而使适应性恐惧反应仅对相关的感觉提示起作用。视频摘要。