The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and ventral hippocampus (vHPC) functionally interact during innate anxiety tasks. To explore the consequences of this interaction, we examined task-related firing of single units from the mPFC of mice exploring standard and modified versions of the elevated plus maze (EPM), an innate anxiety paradigm. Hippocampal local field potentials (LFPs) were simultaneou...

The acquisition and retrieval of contextual fear memory requires coordinated neural activity in the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and amygdala. The contextual information encoded in the hippocampus is conveyed to the mPFC and amygdala for contextual fear conditioning. Previous studies have suggested that a CA1 neuronal population in the ventral hippocampus (VH) projects to both ...

Anatomical evidence indicates that medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) neurons project to the dorsal raphe nucleus (DR). In this study, we functionally characterized this descending pathway in rat brain. Projection neurons in the mPFC were identified by antidromic stimulation from the DR. Electrical stimulation of the mPFC mainly inhibited the activity of DR 5-HT neurons (55 of 66). Peristimulus ti...

The ventral hippocampus (vHPC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and basolateral amygdala (BLA) are each required for the expression of anxiety-like behavior. Yet the role of each individual element of the circuit is unclear. The projection from the vHPC to the mPFC has been implicated in anxiety-related neural synchrony and spatial representations of aversion. The role of this projection was e...

The basolateral nucleus of the amygdala (BLA) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are involved importantly in the processing and encoding of emotionally salient learned associations. Here, we examined the possible role of the mPFC in the acquisition and encoding of emotional associative learning at the behavioral and single-neuron level. A subpopulation of neurons in the mPFC that received mono...

Although the medial prefrontal cortex (mpFC) appears to constrain stress responses, indirect evidences suggest that it might determine the stress response of the mesoaccumbens dopamine (DA) system. To test this hypothesis, we first evaluated the dynamics of norepinephrine (NE) and DA release in the mpFC and of DA release in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) of acutely stressed rats. Then, we tested t...

Most of the research on cortical processing of taste has focused on either the primary gustatory cortex (GC) or the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). However, these are not the only areas involved in taste processing. Gustatory information can also reach another frontal region, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), via direct projections from GC. mPFC has been studied extensively in relation to its ro...

The hippocampal formation (HPC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) have well-established roles in memory encoding and retrieval. However, the mechanisms underlying interactions between the HPC and mPFC in achieving these functions is not fully understood. Considerable research supports the idea that a direct pathway from the HPC and subiculum to the mPFC is critically involved in cognitive and...

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) modulate anxiety and social behaviors. It remains to be elucidated, however, whether direct projections from the BLA to the mPFC play a functional role in these behaviors. We used optogenetic approaches in behaving mice to either activate or inhibit BLA inputs to the mPFC during behavioral assays that assess anxiety-like beh...

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of both rats and rabbits has been shown to support trace eyeblink conditioning, presumably by providing an input to the cerebellum via the pons that bridges the temporal gap between conditioning stimuli. The pons of rats and rabbits, however, shows divergence in gross anatomical organization, leaving open the question of whether the topography of prefrontal i...