KiF1a-regulated neuronal infrastructures in sensory and prefrontal cortices essential for fear-relevant anxiety

Abstract

Stress in social activities induces fears. Cellular infrastructures and molecular profiles underlying fear-relevant psychosis remain elusive. By giving psychological stress to mice that watched fear scenes in the resident/intruder paradigm, we have studied the features of neuronal infrastructures in visual, auditory and medial prefrontal cortices correlated to fear-induced anxiety by approaches of behavior task, neural tracing, molecular biology and electrophysiology in vivo. This psychological stress causes observational mice fears specific to resident mouse and anxiety. This social phobia is associated with the interconnections newly emerged among visual, auditory and medial prefrontal cortices as well as among intramodal neurons. These cortical neurons receive the new synapse innervations from their interconnected neurons alongside the innate synapse innervations, and become to encode the stress signals including battle image and battle sound. The KiF1a knockdown in the medial prefrontal cortex precludes the formations of neuronal infrastructures and social phobia. KiF1a-mediated intracellular transportation in the medial prefrontal cortex is essential for the recruitment of associative memory neurons that encode fear scenes and anxiety. HighlightO_LIPsychological stress induces fears and interconnections among sensory and prefrontal cortices. C_LIO_LIAssociative memory neurons in these cortices are recruited to encode fear scenes and anxiety. C_LIO_LIKiF1a-mediated transportation essential for these cellular infrastructures relevant to learned fear. C_LI