Nov 15, 2010

How fear flows through the mind

“A neuronal circuit in the brain acts like a seesaw to control fear impulses, reveals a surprisingly up-close look at neurons. Researchers have identified two neuron populations in the brain that work together to control fear impulses.

The findings, published this week in a pair of complementary papers in Nature, may someday facilitate the development of better therapeutic interventions for psychiatric illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias.

“A real exciting aspect of this work is how we’ve now come to understand the regulation of complex emotion — in this case fear — at a single cell level,” said Stephen Maren, director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research. “That’s a pretty impressive feat.”

The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the brain involved in emotional memory and learning, has historically been considered key in processing fear impulses, but researchers at the California Institute of Technology wanted to understand the process at the level of cells. “Ultimately, we’d like a mechanistic understanding of how specific circuits, not only regions, generate brain functions like fear,” said Wulf Haubensak, a postdoc and first author on the first paper.

After conducting systematic screens for genes marking neurons in the amygdala, the team focused on one — a gene encoding protein kinase C delta, or PKC-δ, which was specifically expressed in a subpopulation of neurons that had not been studied in detail. “We decided to try and find out what these cells do,” said David Anderson, a biologist and senior author on the paper. ”

Read more at The Scientist

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