Fig. 1: CA3 NRs and CA3 activity are important for cued-fear memory.

a Animals used in this study. b Light-cued-fear conditioning (LFC) task. c, d Cued freezing levels during (c) 24 h long-term (two-tailed unpaired Student’s t test, P = 0.046), and (d) 2 h short-term, memory tests. e Contextual freezing levels during a 24 h long-term memory test in the LFC task. f Auditory-cued-fear conditioning (AFC) task. g Cued freezing levels during the 24 h long-term test in AFC task (two-tailed unpaired Student’s t test, P = 0.02). h Animal and virus vector used for optogenetic CA3 silencing. i Coronal section of the hippocampus with EYFP-expressing cells. All of the animals incorporated as data showed similar expression pattern. Scale bar, 500 μm. j Schedule for optogenetic experiment. k, l Cued freezing levels during the 24 h long-term memory test in the (k) LFC (two-tailed unpaired Student’s t test, P = 0.039), and (l) AFC tasks (two-tailed unpaired Student’s t test, P = 0.04). P values determined using an unpaired two-tailed t test (*P < 0.05) (c-e, g, k, l). Graphs represent the mean ± SEM, and circles within the graphs represent individual animals. Numbers in parentheses denote the number of mice in each group used for the study. Lightning bolt, footshock; Light bulb, light CS; Cxt, context; Speaker, tone CS; HPC, hippocampus; AP, anterior-posterior; N.S., not significant. Detailed statistics are shown in Supplementary Data 1.