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Authors & Affiliations
Alessia Manganaro, Lillian Bryan, Domingo Fortuna, Dani Dumitriu
Abstract
Individual response to stressful events varies greatly and can impact behavioral and neurological outcomes. Depending on intrinsic and extrinsic factors, active, passive, or maladaptive coping behavior can emerge in the same subject when exposed to different stressors. Rodent stress models such as Learned Helplessness (LH) and Social Defeat Stress (SDS) have been used to uncover a stressor’s impact on behavior and the underlying brain changes. In LH, mice subjected to inescapable shocks can have inappropriate passive behavior or “helplessness”, or continue to exhibit normal escape behavior- "resilience". During ASDS, mice are exposed to aggressive mice, which leads to social avoidance in a subset of mice, while other mice continue to show a normal social approach. Here, we used LH followed ten days later by the acute version of SDS developed in the lab, to determine if susceptibility and resilience to two different types of stressors in the same cohorts of mice emerged from similar neurocircuitries. We first showed that there is no predictability of behavioral outcomes between the two paradigms. Next, we combined the indelible trapping/labelling of active neurons in TRAP2 mice within the first LH shock, followed by cFos protein staining timed to the ASDS aggression to dissect the neuronal substrates of helplessness and social avoidance as well as resiliency to shock and social stressor. We were able to successfully track the neuronal activity at the two different time points in the same mice and dissect convergent and divergent neuronal representations activated by LH and ASDS, respectively.