Vulnerability and resilience to pathological fear memory - a role for neuropetidergic modulation in the dentate gyrus

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Memories for stressful and fear-inducing events are of vital importance for behavioral adaptation to a potentially dangerous environment. However, exaggerated fear memories can develop following the experience of a traumatic stressor and lead to diseases such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Thus, experimental fear conditioning paradigms have been instrumental in resolving fundamental mechanisms of information storage in the nervous system and in studying the development of stress-induced psychopathology. The dentate gyrus as a gateway to the hippocampal formation plays a critical role in the formation and retrieval of contextual fear memory. Activity and plasticity in the dentate gyrus are modulated by stress and are under control of stress-responsive neural circuits. GABAergic local circuit neurons appear to play a pivotal role in this regulation, controlling information flow and excitability in the dentate gyrus in a stress-dependent manner. In the proposed project we aim to determine how two populations of GABAergic interneurons and their associated neuropeptides, neuropeptide Y and cholecystokinin, control adaptive and maladaptive fear memory formation. In specific pre-experiments to this project we found that stress exposure induces lasting expression alterations in these two neuropeptides, which are not only markers for distinct populations of interneurons but themselves act as potent modifiers of anxiety state. We will therefore utilize an established animal model of juvenile stress-induced pathological fear in combination with a novel behavioral profiling approach to determine how individual fear levels relate to the expression and function of neuropeptide Y and cholecystokinin in the dentate gyrus. The applicants further combine their expertise in the analysis of molecular and physiological mechanisms of fear in order to delineate and functionally characterize the interneuron circuits that utilize these peptides and their recruitment by different stress experiences. We will determine how psychological parameters, in particular of controllability as a predisposing factor for maladaptive fear memory, act on local circuit components and may lead to pathology or lasting adaptation. Activation mechanisms acting on these interneuron populations will be examined with high resolution profiling of receptor expression and through amygdala priming experiments that we have previously shown to simulate stress-related modification of dentate gyrus activity and plasticity. Finally, we will recruit specific and selective molecular intervention tools to examine the function of those neuropeptides in the local circuitry and their control of fear behavior and fear memory. We expect that this interdisciplinary study will yield critical understanding of the neural mechanisms of fear adaptation, the individual vulnerability to stress and stress-related psychopathology.