Topic: defensive responses

Animals encounter several dangerous situations during their lives, in response to which appropriate defensive responses are essential for survival. The selection of a proper defensive response to cope with each dangerous encounter relies not only on the recognition of specific threat characteristics and its context, but also on the detection of features shared by different threats. With a novel paradigm that exposes mice to multiple threatening situations, we recently demonstrated that neuronal populations in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) encode both a general danger state and spec

The subiculum > hypothalamic path has critical roles in expressing defensive responses in a wide range of threatening situations. This path is engaged during exposure to a natural predator or its context, social defeat, and contexts related to physically harmful events. Previous data have shown that the ventral and intermediate subiculum provide strong projections to a continuum formed by the anterior hypothalamic nucleus (AHN) and juxtadorsomedial part of the lateral hypothalamic area (LHAjd). By combining track tracing, chemogenetic, and calcium imaging experiments, we focused on differen

Down-regulating emotional overreactions toward threats is fundamental for developing treatments for anxiety and post-traumatic disorders. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for top-down modulatory processes, and despite previous studies adopting repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) over this region provided encouraging results in enhancing extinction, no studies have hitherto explored the effects of stimulating the medial anterior PFC (aPFC, encompassing the Brodmann area 10) on threat memory and generalization. In this study, we aimed to test an rTMS procedure over the aPF

Animal survival depends on effective predator avoidance mechanisms. However, an innately threatening stimulus may prove non-threatening, allowing the animal to ignore it over time. Such adaptation is exemplified by the learned suppression of escape (LSE) paradigm, in which animals adapt to repeated threatening stimuli. Neuromodulation, and more specifically serotonin modulation has been implicated in the expression and modulation of defensive responses. However, its role in the LSE remains unknown. Recently, we observed an upregulation of the serotonin biosynthesis pathway in the dorsal periaq