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Ablation of hippocampal neurogenesis impairs contextual fear conditioning and synaptic plasticity in the dentate gyrus
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Ablation of hippocampal neurogenesis impairs contextual fear conditioning and synaptic plasticity in the dentate gyrus

Michael D. Saxe, Fortunato Battaglia, Jing-Wen Wang, Gael Malleret, Denis J. David, James E. Monckton, A. Denise R. Garcia, Michael V. Sofroniew, Eric R. Kandel, Luca Santarelli, …
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, v 103(46), pp 17501-17506
06 Nov 2006
PMID: 17088541
url
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17501.full.pdfView
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Abstract

Biological Sciences learning long-term potentiation memory
Although hippocampal neurogenesis has been described in many adult mammals, the functional impact of this process on physiology and behavior remains unclear. In the present study, we used two independent methods to ablate hippocampal neurogenesis and found that each procedure caused a limited behavioral deficit and a loss of synaptic plasticity within the dentate gyrus. Specifically, focal X irradiation of the hippocampus or genetic ablation of glial fibrillary acidic protein-positive neural progenitor cells impaired contextual fear conditioning but not cued conditioning. Hippocampal-dependent spatial learning tasks such as the Morris water maze and Y maze were unaffected. These findings show that adult-born neurons make a distinct contribution to some but not all hippocampal functions. In a parallel set of experiments, we show that long-term potentiation elicited in the dentate gyrus in the absence of GABA blockers requires the presence of new neurons, as it is eliminated by each of our ablation procedures. These data show that new hippocampal neurons can be preferentially recruited over mature granule cells in vitro and may provide a framework for how this small cell population can influence behavior.

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