APPETITIVE AND AVERSIVE MEMORY CIRCUITS
Department: Neuroscience
Research subject
Memory is critical for survival. When animals learn to associate a particular place or cues with the presence of reward or punishment, appetitive and aversive memories are formed and can recruit distinct, but also overlapping, neuronal ensembles in different brain circuits.
The aim of the team is to understand how the appetitive and aversive neuronal circuits are shaped by past experience and internal state and to what extent they interact or/are intermingled in the brain to allow the selection of appropriate behaviours such as approach or avoidance. The team employs the TetTag mouse technology (Reijmers et al., 2007; Trouche et al., 2013, 2016, and see engram studies) to label, manipulate and monitor in behaving mice discrete neuronal ensembles that were activated at a particular time window (for instance, during learning). My own research has revealed novel neural circuits (within the dorsal CA1 hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens and the basolateral amygdala) underlying appetitive memories linking a particular place with rewards such as sucrose or cocaine and aversive memories linking a context with a mild punishment. Noteworthy, my previous work focused on fear extinction memories modifying the original fear memory trace. Since the omission of an expected fearful event during extinction may be actually rewarding, it can involve the interaction between the appetitive and aversive circuits in both vertebrates and invertebrates to promote appropriate behaviour. By employing in vivo recordings in behaving mice, opto/pharmacogenetics and intersectional viral strategies in different mouse lines (including the TetTag system), the team aims to provide a mechanistic understanding of the cross-talk between the reward and aversive systems. This knowlege will advance our theoretical understanding on psychiatric disorders for which emotional and decision-making processes are altered (e.g., PTSD).
Team
Major publications
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Perisse E, Miranda M and Trouche S. Modulation of aversive value coding in the vertebrate and invertebrate brain. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2023, Apr;79:102696.
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Fölsz O, Trouche S and Croset V. Adult-born neurons add flexibility to hippocampal memories. Frontiers, 2023, 2023 Feb 15;17:1128623.
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Sasaki Russell J, Trouche S and Reijmers LG. Functional characterization of the basal amygdala - dorsal BNST pathway during contextual fear conditioning. eNeuro, 2020 Jul 13;7(4):.0163-20.2020.
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Trouche S, Pompili N and Girardeau G. The role of sleep in emotional processing: insights and unknowns from rodent research. Current Opinion in Physiology, 2020 Jun; p230-237.
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Trouche S, Koren V, Doig NM, Ellender TJ, El-Gaby M, Lopes-dos-Santos V, Reeve HM, Perestenko PV, Garas FN, Magill PJ, Sharott A and Dupret D. A hippocampus-accumbens tripartite neuronal motif guides appetitive memory in space. Cell, 2019 Mar 7;176(6):1393-1406.e16.
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Trouche S, Perestenko PV, van de Ven GM, Bratley CB, McNamara CG, Campo-Urriza N, Black SL, Reijmers LG, Dupret D. Recoding a cocaine-place memory engram to a neutral engram in the hippocampus. Nature Neuroscience, 2016 Apr;19(4):564-7.
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Trouche S, Sasaki J, Tu T, Reijmers LG. Fear extinction causes target specific remodeling of basal amygdala perisomatic synapses. Neuron, 2013 Nov20;80(4):1054-65.
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Trouche S, Bontempi B, Roullet P, Rampon C. Recruitment of adult generated neurons into functional hippocampal networks contributes to updating and strengthening of spatial memory. PNAS, 2009 Apr7; 106(14):5919-24.