Rodrigo Campos-Cardoso, Zephyr R Desa, Brianna L Fitzgerald, Alana G Moore, Jace L Duhon, Victoria A Landar, Roger L Clem, Kirstie A Cummings
The rodent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is functionally organized across the dorsoventral axis, where dorsal and ventral subregions promote and suppress fear, respectively. As the ventral-most subregion, the dorsal peduncular cortex (DP) is hypothesized to function in fear suppression. However, this role has not been explicitly tested. Here, we demonstrate that the DP paradoxically functions as a fear-encoding brain region and plays a minimal role in fear suppression. By using multimodal analyses, we demonstrate that DP neurons exhibit fear-learning-related plasticity and acquire cue-associated activity across learning and memory retrieval and that DP neurons activated by fear memory acquisition are preferentially reactivated upon fear memory retrieval...
April 12, 2024: Cell Reports