A fear conditioned cue orchestrates a suite of behaviors in rats
- Boston College, United States
Abstract
Pavlovian fear conditioning has been extensively used to study the behavioral and neural basis of defensive systems. In a typical procedure, a cue is paired with foot shock, and subsequent cue presentation elicits freezing, a behavior theoretically linked to predator detection. Studies have since shown a fear conditioned cue can elicit locomotion, a behavior that - in addition to jumping, and rearing - is theoretically linked to imminent or occurring predation. A criticism of studies observing fear conditioned cue-elicited locomotion is that responding is non-associative. We gave rats Pavlovian fear discrimination over a baseline of reward seeking. TTL-triggered cameras captured 5 behavior frames/s around cue presentation. Experiment 1 examined the emergence of danger-specific behaviors over fear acquisition. Experiment 2 examined the expression of danger-specific behaviors in fear extinction. In total, we scored 112,000 frames for nine discrete behavior categories. Temporal ethograms show that during acquisition, a fear conditioned cue suppresses reward seeking and elicits freezing, but also elicits locomotion, jumping, and rearing - all of which are maximal when foot shock is imminent. During extinction, a fear conditioned cue most prominently suppresses reward seeking, and elicits locomotion that is timed to shock delivery. The independent expression of these behaviors in both experiments reveal a fear conditioned cue to orchestrate a temporally organized suite of behaviors.
Data availability
Raw images and observer judgments are freely available: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HKMUUN
Article and author information
Author details
Michael A McDannald
Funding
National Institutes of Health (MH117791)
- Michael A McDannald
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All protocols were approved by the Boston College Animal Care and Use Committee and all experiments were carried out in accordance with the NIH guidelines regarding the care and use of rats for experimental procedures. The Boston College experimental protocol supporting these procedures is 2024-001.
Copyright
© 2024, Chu et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,027
- views
-
- 139
- downloads
-
- 12
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
A fear conditioned cue orchestrates a suite of behaviors in rats
eLife 13:e82497.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82497
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Techniques that enable precise manipulations of subsets of neurons in the fly central nervous system (CNS) have greatly facilitated our understanding of the neural basis of behavior. Split-GAL4 driver lines allow specific targeting of cell types in Drosophila melanogaster and other species. We describe here a collection of 3060 lines targeting a range of cell types in the adult Drosophila CNS and 1373 lines characterized in third-instar larvae. These tools enable functional, transcriptomic, and proteomic studies based on precise anatomical targeting. NeuronBridge and other search tools relate light microscopy images of these split-GAL4 lines to connectomes reconstructed from electron microscopy images. The collections are the result of screening over 77,000 split hemidriver combinations. Previously published and new lines are included, all validated for driver expression and curated for optimal cell-type specificity across diverse cell types. In addition to images and fly stocks for these well-characterized lines, we make available 300,000 new 3D images of other split-GAL4 lines.
-
- Neuroscience
Cell identification is an important yet difficult process in data analysis of biological images. Previously, we developed an automated cell identification method called CRF_ID and demonstrated its high performance in Caenorhabditis elegans whole-brain images (Chaudhary et al., 2021). However, because the method was optimized for whole-brain imaging, comparable performance could not be guaranteed for application in commonly used C. elegans multi-cell images that display a subpopulation of cells. Here, we present an advancement, CRF_ID 2.0, that expands the generalizability of the method to multi-cell imaging beyond whole-brain imaging. To illustrate the application of the advance, we show the characterization of CRF_ID 2.0 in multi-cell imaging and cell-specific gene expression analysis in C. elegans. This work demonstrates that high-accuracy automated cell annotation in multi-cell imaging can expedite cell identification and reduce its subjectivity in C. elegans and potentially other biological images of various origins.
