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Stress-activated neuronal ensemble in the supramammillary nucleus stores anxiety but not memory

Zhang, J.; Yu, K.; Zhang, J.; Chang, Y.; Sun, X.; Qian, Z.; Sun, Z.; Liu, Z.; Ren, W.; Han, J.

2025-01-16 neuroscience
10.1101/2025.01.15.633288 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Anxiety is a prevalent negative emotional state induced by stress; however, the neural mechanism underlying anxiety is still largely unknown. We used acute and chronic stress to induce anxiety and test anxiety-like behavior; immunostaining, multichannel extracellular electrophysiological recording and Ca2+ imaging to evaluate neuronal activity; and virus-based neuronal tracing to label circuits and manipulate circuitry activity. Here, we identified a hypothalamic region, the supramammillary nucleus (SuM), plays important role in anxiety-like behavior. We then characterized a small ensemble of stress-activated neurons (SANs) that are recruited by stress. These SANs respond specifically to stress, and their activation robustly increases anxiety-like behavior in male mice. We also found that ventral subiculum (vSub)-SuM projection but not dorsal subiculum (dSub)-SuM projections encode anxiety-like behavior and that inhibition of these vSub-SuM projections has an antianxiety effect. These results indicate that the reactivation of stress-activated supramammillary cells and relevant neural circuits are important neural processes underlying anxiety-like behavior.

Published in eLife (predicted rank #2) · training set

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