Learn. Mem.
HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced]


     

Published online April 3, 2008, 10.1101/lm.793008
 LEARNING & MEMORY 15:252-260
©2008 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; ISSN 1072-0502/08 $5.00
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow reprints & permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Kluge, C.
Right arrow Articles by Pape, H.-C.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Kluge, C.
Right arrow Articles by Pape, H.-C.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati  
What's this?

Research
Role of the somatostatin system in contextual fear memory and hippocampal synaptic plasticity

Christian Kluge1,4,5, Christian Stoppel2,4,5, Csaba Szinyei1, Oliver Stork2,3, and Hans-Christian Pape1,6

1 Institute of Physiology I (Neurophysiology), Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany; 2 Institute of Physiology, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany; 3 Department of Molecular Neurobiology, Institute of Biology and Center for Behavioural Brain Sciences, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany

Somatostatin has been implicated in various cognitive and emotional functions, but its precise role is still poorly understood. Here, we have made use of mice with somatostatin deficiency, based upon genetic invalidation or pharmacologically induced depletion, and Pavlovian fear conditioning in order to address the contribution of the somatostatin system to associative fear memory. The results demonstrate an impairment of foreground and background contextual but not tone fear conditioning in mice with targeted ablation of the somatostatin gene. These deficits were associated with a decrease in long-term potentiation in the CA1 area of the hippocampus. Both the behavioral and the electrophysiological phenotypes were mimicked in wild-type mice through application of the somatostatin-depleting substance cysteamine prior to fear training, whereas no further deficits were observed upon application in the somatostatin null mutants. These results suggest that the somatostatin system plays a critical role in the acquisition of contextual fear memory, but not tone fear learning, and further highlights the role of hippocampal synaptic plasticity for information processing concerning contextual information.

Received October 5, 2007; accepted in revised form January 18, 2008.

4 These authors contributed equally to this work.

5 Present address: Department of Neurology II, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Leipziger Str. 44, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany.

6 Corresponding author.

E-mail papechris{at}ukmuenster.de; fax 49-251-8355551.

Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.793008.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?




HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright © 2008 by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.