Year: 2023
Type: peer-review
Abstract: Behavioral flexibility and timely reactions to salient stimuli are essential for survival.The subcortical thalamic-basolateral amygdala (BLA) pathway serves as a shortcut for salient stimuli ensuring rapid processing.Here, we show that BLA neuronal and thalamic axonal activity in mice mirror the defensive behavior evoked by an innate visual threat as well as an auditory learned threat.Importantly, perturbing this pathway compromises defensive responses to both forms of threats, in that animals fail to switch from exploratory to defensive behavior.Despite the shared pathway between the two forms of threat processing, we observed noticeable differences.Blocking β-adrenergic receptors impairs the defensive response to the innate but not the learned threats.This reduced defensive response, surprisingly, is reflected in the suppression of the activity exclusively in the BLA as the thalamic input response remains intact.Our side-by-side examination highlights the similarities and differences between innate and learned threat-processing, thus providing new fundamental insights. Editor's evaluationThis study presents valuable insights into the circuits that are common for innate and acquired threats.The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, and the use of state-of-the-art methodology for the study of neural circuits, including chemogenetics, optogenetics, and fiber photometry, is appropriate.This work will be of interest to neuroscientists studying defensive behaviors as well as those in the field of multisensory thalamic integration.
Author: Mario A Penzo
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4386123776