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Learning and memory

Synapse remodelling extinguishes fear

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 15, page 3 (2014)Cite this article

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Some neurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) are activated during fear conditioning and are subsequently reactivated during the expression of learned fear. To determine the effects of fear extinction on these 'fear neurons', the authors used transgenic mice in which excitatory neurons that were active during fear conditioning were fluorescently tagged and examined the effects of subsequent extinction training on the activity of the tagged fear neurons. They identified a population of fear neurons that were no longer active when the animals were re-exposed to the conditioning context after extinction training (termed 'silent fear neurons'), which confirmed that fear extinction silences neurons that are normally active in the fear circuit.

perisomatic inhibitory synapses in the BLA undergo structural changes in response to contextual fear extinction

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References

  1. Trouche, S. et al. Fear extinction causes target-specific remodeling of perisomatic inhibitory synapses. Neuron 80, 1054–1065 (2013)

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  1. Katherine Whalley
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Whalley, K. Synapse remodelling extinguishes fear. Nat Rev Neurosci 15, 3 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3658

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