Faculty in the Lab: Duality of Fear

Photography by Tim Holford, Ph.D., instructor, Florida Atlantic Max Plank Honors Program,
Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience and Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College

Neurons in the central amygdala are important for regulating various aspects of social and emotional life and are commonly disrupted in neurological disorders. In our research, we identify circuit abnormalities in a mouse model of autism spectrum disorder where the regulatory protein PTEN is removed from a subset of inhibitory cells in the brain called Somatostatin-expressing interneurons. Mice carrying the SOM-PTEN deletion displayed elevated levels of fear expression, anxiety and sensory sensitivity, as well as substantially impaired connectivity and synaptic strength within the central amygdala compared to wild type mice, which could lead to those behavioral disruptions. This image was acquired during a circuit mapping experiment, where we probe cell to cell communication using a combination of 2-photon microscopy, optogenetics and electrophysiology to stimulate and image individual neurons while recording their influence onto a postsynaptic cell. SOM cells are blue and GCamp cells (to read out neural activity) are green.