Cell types in the mouse amygdala and their transcriptional response to fear conditioning

Abstract

The amygdala is one of the most widely studied regions in behavioral neuroscience. A plethora of classical, and new paradigms have dissected its precise involvement in emotional and social sensing, learning, and memory. Several important insights resulted from the use of genetic markers - yet, in the age of single cell transcriptomics, the amygdala remains molecularly underdescribed. Here, we present a molecular cell type taxonomy of the full mouse amygdala in fear learning and consolidation. We performed single-cell RNA-seq on naive and fear conditioned mice, inferred the 130 neuronal cell types distributions in silico using orthogonal spatial transcriptomic datasets, and describe the cell types transcriptional responses to learning and memory consolidation. Only a fraction of cells, within a subset of all neuronal types, were transcriptionally responsive to fear learning, memory and retrieval. These activated engram cells upregulated activity-response genes, and processes of synaptic signaling, plasticity, development and neurite outgrowth. Our transcriptome-wide data confirm known actors, and describe several new candidate genes. The atlas may help pinpoint the amygdalas circuits in performing emotional sensing and integration, and provide new insights to the global cellular processes involved.