KiF1a-regulated neuronal infrastructures in sensory and prefrontal cortices essential for fear memory and anxiety

Stress in social activities induces fears. Cellular infrastructures and molecular profiles underlying fear memory to psychological stress remain elusive for designing therapeutic strategies. With making mice psychological trauma by watching fear scenes in a resident/intruder paradigm, we have studied the features of neuronal infrastructures in visual, auditory and medial prefrontal cortices correlated to this learned fear by the approaches of behavioral task, neural tracing, electrophysiology and molecular biology. This psychological trauma causes observational mice fear memory specific to resident mouse. This learned fear is associated with the formation of synapse interconnections among visual, auditory and medial prefrontal cortices and the strengthening of synapse interconnections among intramodal neurons. These cortical neurons receive new synapse innervations from their interconnected neurons alongside innate synapse innervations and become to encode the stress signals including battle image and battle sound inputted from these synapses. The KiF1a knockdown in the medial prefrontal cortex precludes the onsets of the neuronal infrastructures and the learned fear. KiF1a-mediated intracellular transportation in the medial prefrontal cortex is essential for the recruitment of associative memory neurons that encode fear scenes and anxiety.