Optical and computational dissection of emergent prefrontal rewiring to encode fear memory

2021 
The prefrontal cortex regulates various emotional behaviors and memories, and prefrontal dysfunction can trigger psychiatric disorders. While untangling the internal network may provide clues to the neural architecture underlying such disorders, it is technically difficult due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the network. Here we propose an optical and computational dissection of the internal prefrontal network based on chronic two-photon imaging and a sparse modeling algorithm, which enabled the discrimination of newly emerged neuronal ensembles specifically encoding conditioned fear responses. Further graphical modeling revealed that neurons responding to the unconditioned stimulus during fear conditioning became a core of the ensembles with an enhanced capability for pattern completion, demonstrating the activity dependent rewiring upon the associative learning.
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