Biology subjects

Canela-Grimau, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Canela-Grimau, M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Sex-dependent cortico-amygdala circuits controlling emotion recognition

In social species, the ability to recognize others emotional states is essential for appropriate social interactions, yet it often declines with age and is impaired in various neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. While emotion recognition has been characterized in both humans and rodents, the underlying neural circuits and how they vary by sex and age remain poorly understood. Here, we used a negative Emotional state Discrimination Task (EDT) in TRAP2 transgenic mice to map brain regions engaged during negative emotion recognition in young and aged animals. Young male and female mice successfully discriminated emotionally altered conspecifics, recruiting the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (MO) in a sex-specific manner. Fiber photometry revealed distinct activation dynamics in these regions, and chemogenetic inhibition of bidirectional BLA-MO projections abolished emotion recognition in male but not female mice. Notably, young human participants also showed sex-specific recruitment of BLA and OFC during negative facial emotion recognition. Moreover, aging selectively impaired emotion recognition in male mice, coinciding with reduced BLA activity. Remarkably, chemogenetic activation of BLA in aged male mice rescued this deficit. Together, these findings identify a sex-dependent BLA-MO circuit as a conserved neural substrate for emotion recognition and demonstrate that age-related impairments can be reversed through targeted circuit-level intervention.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Dentate gyrus and CA3 activity mediate light-tone second-order conditioning expression in mice

Second-order conditioning (SOC) enables animals to form complex predictions about their environment, even in the absence of direct experience. While the neural mechanisms underlying first-order conditioning (FOC) are well characterized, the circuits supporting SOC expression remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we investigated the brain regions and cell types involved in SOC recall in mice and tackled the technical challenges of quantifying brain-wide neural activity. We employed a light-tone SOC paradigm in TRAP2:Ai14 mice, which allowed us to tag neurons active during SOC recall via tdTomato expression. Applying generalized linear models, we identified that the activity in the dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3 regions of the dorsal hippocampus significantly associated with SOC-related behavioral responses. To test their functional relevance, we used chemogenetic inhibition of CaMKII+ neurons in these regions, which confirmed a causal role for DG/CA3 circuits in SOC recall. Together, our results highlight the dorsal hippocampus as a critical substrate for retrieving indirectly learned associations.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Projecting neurons from lateral entorhinal cortex to basolateral amygdala mediate the encoding of incidental odor-taste associations

Daily choices are determined by prior direct or indirect associations between low-salience cues and reinforcers. In this study, we used a mouse odor-taste sensory preconditioning task combined with genetic, intersectional and chemogenetic approaches to identify a novel brain circuit involved in mediated learning. We found that neuronal projections from the lateral entorhinal cortex to the basolateral amygdala are engaged during low-salience stimuli associations, which is essential for mediated learning formation.

neuroscience↗