PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Kai Yu
AU  - Sandra Ahrens
AU  - Xian Zhang
AU  - Hillary Schiff
AU  - Charu Ramakrishnan
AU  - Lief Fenno
AU  - Karl Deisseroth
AU  - Pengcheng Zhou
AU  - Liam Paninski
AU  - Bo Li
TI  - The central amygdala controls learning in the lateral amygdala
AID  - 10.1101/126649
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 126649
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/11/126649.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/11/126649.full
AB  - Both the lateral and the central nuclei of the amygdala are required for adaptive behavioral responses to environmental cues predicting threats. While experience-driven synaptic plasticity in the lateral amygdala is thought to underlie the formation of association between a sensory stimulus and an ensuing threat, how the central amygdala participates in such learning process remains unclear. Here we show that a specific class of central amygdala neurons, the protein kinase C-δ-expressing neurons, is essential for the synaptic plasticity underlying learning in the lateral amygdala, as it is required for lateral amygdala neurons to respond to unconditioned stimulus, and furthermore carries information about the unconditioned stimulus to instruct learning. Our results uncover an amygdala functional organization that may play a key role in diverse learning processes.