Neuronal circuits responsible of temporal maintenance of aversive memories

JOAQUIN PIRIZ; TOMAS SACHELLA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 2nd FALAN Congress; 2016

Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies (FALAN)

If memory is thought as a process by which events thatoccurred in the past are retained, a central feature of it isthe persistence over timer. However, the mechanisms thatdetermine that a memory lasts days, weeks, months oryears have been little studied. Recent works demonstratedthat pharmacology inactivation of habenula duringinhibitory avoidance acquisition selectively inhibitstemporal stability of the formed memory without blockingmemory formation. This points to the habenula as the onlystructure identified to the moment whose activity duringacquisition of an aversive memory specifically relates to itslong-term temporal stability. In order to study the neuronalcircuits responsible of this modulation we implementeda chemogenetic control system of the lateral habenula(LHb). In this work we show results demonstrating that LHbinactivation by means of chemogenetic methods emulatesresults obtained pharmacologically. These tools will allow todissect the neuronal circuits responsible of determining thetemporal stability of memory.