Topic: conditioned freezing

The endogenous circadian rhythm of organisms maintains fundamental physiological processes and behaviour by synchronising them to the external environment. Disturbance to this rhythm in our modern societies, caused by the use of artificial light in dark periods, electronic gadgets, shift work, and poor sleep hygiene negatively impacts physiological and cognitive health. Studies in rodent hippocampus show that neuronal membrane excitability shows a diurnal rhythm and disturbance to the circadian cycle impairs hippocampal plasticity and memory. However, it is not clear how acute circadian distur

Basolateral amygdala (BLA) principal neurons form distinct long-range circuits that mediate negative (via projections to the central amygdala) and positive (via projections to the nucleus accumbens) valence (Namburi et al., 2015). In a series of experiments using rats, we investigated the roles of these BLA pathways in Pavlovian fear learning. First, consistent with past work in mice, retrograde tracing showed that the two pathways were largely segregated; but, in contrast to past work in mice, single molecule FISH showed that these two pathways shared similar molecular profiles. Then, we used