ArticleFrontiers in cellular neuroscience2019
Contextual Fear Conditioning Alter Microglia Number and Morphology in the Rat Dorsal Hippocampus.
Article in Frontiers in cellular neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex-specific role of microglia in ΔNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- A novel finding on sex-dependent diverse behavioral responses to the anticipation of a threat in a rat model of fear conditioning with the involvement of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the prefrontal cortex.Learning & behavior · 2026Article
- Sex-dependent role of hippocampal BDNF and GSK-3β in mediating PTSD-like behaviors in both sexes of adolescent rats exposed to fear conditioning, extinction, and reinstatement.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- New Insights into Contradictory Changes in Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) in Rodent Models of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).Neurochemical research · 2024Review
- Article
- Enhancing Associative Learning in Rats With a Computationally Designed Training Protocol.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- Interaction of Brain-derived Neurotrophic Factor, Exercise, and Fear Extinction: Implications for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.Current neuropharmacology · 2024Review
- Microglial morphometric analysis: so many options, so little consistency.Frontiers in neuroinformatics · 2023Review
- Article
- Recombinant human erythropoietin induces neuroprotection, activates MAPK/CREB pathway, and rescues fear memory after traumatic brain injury with delayed hypoxemia in mice.Brain research · 2022Article
- An emerging role for microglia in stress-effects on memory.The European journal of neuroscience · 2022Review
- Cytokines in the Brain and Neuroinflammation: We Didn't Starve the Fire!Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- The effect of stress and reward on encoding future fear memories.Behavioural brain research · 2022Review
- The Effect of 2.45 GHz Electromagnetic Fields on Fear Memory Extinction in Male Rats.Journal of lasers in medical sciences · 2022Article
- Retrieval of olfactory fear memory alters cell proliferation and expression of pCREB and pMAPK in the corticomedial amygdala and piriform cortex.Chemical senses · 2022Article
- Microglial synaptic pruning on axon initial segment spines of dentate granule cells: Sexually dimorphic effects of early-life stress and consequences for adult fear response.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2021Article
- Selective Ablation of BDNF from Microglia Reveals Novel Roles in Self-Renewal and Hippocampal Neurogenesis.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Sex-Specific Linear Polyubiquitination Is a Critical Regulator of Contextual Fear Memory Formation.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Contextual Fear Memory Maintenance Changes Expression of pMAPK, BDNF and IBA-1 in the Pre-limbic Cortex in a Layer-Specific Manner.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2021Article
- Profiling DNA break sites and transcriptional changes in response to contextual fear learning.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Contextual fear conditioning is a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm capable of rapidly creating fear memories to contexts, such as rooms or chambers. Contextual fear conditioning protocols have long been utilized to evaluate how fear memories are consolidated, maintained, expressed, recalled, and extinguished within the brain. These studies have identified the lateral portion of the amygdala and the dorsal portion of the hippocampus as essential for contextual fear memory consolidation. The current study was designed to evaluate how two different contextual fear memories alter amygdala and hippocampus microglia, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and phosphorylated cyclic-AMP response element binding (pCREB). We find rats provided with standard contextual fear conditioning to have more microglia and more cells expressing BDNF in the dentate gyrus as compared to a context only control group. Additionally, standard contextual fear conditioning altered microglia morphology to become amoeboid in shape - a common response to central nervous system insult, such as traumatic brain injury, infection, ischemia, and more. The unpaired fear conditioning procedure (whereby non-reinforced and non-overlapping auditory tones were provided at random intervals during conditioning), despite producing equivalent levels of fear as the standard procedure, did not alter microglia, BDNF or pCREB number in any dorsal hippocampus or lateral amygdala brain regions. Despite this, the unpaired fear conditioning protocol produced some alterations in microglia morphology, but less compared to rats provided with standard contextual fear conditioning. Results from this study demonstrate that contextual fear conditioning is capable of producing large alterations to dentate gyrus plasticity and microglia, whereas unpaired fear conditioning only produces minor changes to microglia morphology. These data show, for the first time, that Pavlovian fear conditioning protocols can induce similar responses as trauma, infection or other insults within the central nervous system.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.