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Encoding Fear of Heights by Basolateral Amygdala Neurons

Jun Liu, Longnian Lin, View ORCID ProfileDong V Wang
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.13.990671
Jun Liu
1Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA
2Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), School of Life Science, NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
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Longnian Lin
2Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), School of Life Science, NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
3Tongji University Brain and Spinal Cord Clinical Center, Shanghai, China
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  • For correspondence: lnlin@brain.ecnu.edu.cn dw657@drexel.edu
Dong V Wang
1Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA
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  • ORCID record for Dong V Wang
  • For correspondence: lnlin@brain.ecnu.edu.cn dw657@drexel.edu
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SUMMARY

Fear of heights is evolutionarily important for survival, yet it is unclear how and which brain regions encode such height threats. Given the importance of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in processing both learned and innate fear, we investigated how BLA neurons may respond to high place exposure in freely behaving mice. We found that a discrete set of BLA neurons exhibited robust firing increases when the mouse was either exploring or placed on a high place, accompanied by increased heart rate and freezing. Importantly, these high-place fear neurons were only activated under height threats but not mild anxiogenic conditions. Furthermore, after a fear conditioning procedure, these high-place fear neurons developed conditioned responses to the context, but not the cue, indicating a convergence in encoding of dangerous/risky contextual information. Our results provide insights into the neural representation of the fear of heights and may have implications for treatment of excessive fear disorders.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 14, 2020.
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Encoding Fear of Heights by Basolateral Amygdala Neurons
Jun Liu, Longnian Lin, Dong V Wang
bioRxiv 2020.03.13.990671; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.13.990671
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Encoding Fear of Heights by Basolateral Amygdala Neurons
Jun Liu, Longnian Lin, Dong V Wang
bioRxiv 2020.03.13.990671; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.13.990671

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