Cell Reports
Volume 22, Issue 4, 23 January 2018, Pages 905-918
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Article
Organization of Valence-Encoding and Projection-Defined Neurons in the Basolateral Amygdala

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2017.12.097Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • BLA neurons projecting to NAc, CeA, and vHPC are intermingled in distinct gradients

  • Positive and negative valence-encoding BLA neurons are intermingled throughout BLA

  • Projection-defined BLA populations differ in the size of local networks recruited

  • BLA-CeA neurons suppress a larger local network than BLA-NAc or BLA-vHPC neurons

Summary

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) mediates associative learning for both fear and reward. Accumulating evidence supports the notion that different BLA projections distinctly alter motivated behavior, including projections to the nucleus accumbens (NAc), medial aspect of the central amygdala (CeM), and ventral hippocampus (vHPC). Although there is consensus regarding the existence of distinct subsets of BLA neurons encoding positive or negative valence, controversy remains regarding the anatomical arrangement of these populations. First, we map the location of more than 1,000 neurons distributed across the BLA and recorded during a Pavlovian discrimination task. Next, we determine the location of projection-defined neurons labeled with retrograde tracers and use CLARITY to reveal the axonal path in 3-dimensional space. Finally, we examine the local influence of each projection-defined populations within the BLA. Understanding the functional and topographical organization of circuits underlying valence assignment could reveal fundamental principles about emotional processing.

Keywords

reward
aversion
topography
tracing
connectivity
network
channelrhodopsin
phototagging
photoexcitation
photoinhition

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These authors contributed equally

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