Priority CommunicationThe Recruitment of a Neuronal Ensemble in the Central Nucleus of the Amygdala During the First Extinction Episode Has Persistent Effects on Extinction Expression
Section snippets
Subjects
One hundred ninety-nine male Sprague Dawley Fos-LacZ transgenic rats (RRID:RRRC_00865; weight: 350–470 g) were bred in-house at Concordia University and maintained on a reverse light cycle. See the Supplement for more details. All experimental procedures were in accordance with the approval granted by the Canadian Council on Animal Care and the Concordia University Animal Care Committee.
Surgery, Drugs, and Infusion
Standard surgical and drug infusion procedures were performed as previously described (26,27), with bilateral
CN but Not BLA Neurons Are Preferentially Recruited During Extinction
We characterized BLA and CN neurons activated during extinction. Rats learned to discriminate between a reinforced target cue and a nonreinforced control cue (Figure 1A, B; see the Supplement for data). After discrimination training, half the rats received extinction of the target cue (extinction group), while the other half continued to receive nonreinforced presentations of the control cue (control group) (Figure 1B). Extinction training was followed by fluorescent immunohistochemistry to
Discussion
Here, we disrupted the balance between extinction and acquisition by deleting extinction-recruited neurons in the BLA and CN. We found that CN but not BLA extinction ensembles are critical for extinction retrieval even after further learning. In addition, deletion of these ensembles enhanced the behavioral control exerted by the initial acquisition memory following the passage of time (spontaneous recovery) and outcome re-exposure (reinstatement). Our results shed new light on the relative
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
This work was supported by Fonds de recherche du Quebec Nouveaux Chercheurs grant (Grant No. 2017-NC-198182 [to MDI]), a National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator grant (Grant No. 24748 [to MDI]), a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Project Grant (Grant No. PJT-155927[to MDI]), the Canada Research Chairs Program (Grant No. 950-230456 [to MDI]), a Concordia University Horizon postdoctoral fellowship (to BPPL), and a Fonds de recherche du Quebec Sante
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