Alexis Sarne | 2025 I.S. Symposium

Name:Alexis Sarne
Title: A TRAPped & DREADD-ed Memory: Contextual Fear Memory & DPAT
Major: Neuroscience
Minor:Biology
Advisors: Alfredo Zuniga; Grit Herzmann

Post-traumatic stress and similar fear disorders are characterized by the experience of fear in an inappropriate context. These conditions have a detrimental impact on those who suffer from them, greatly hurting their quality of life. Pharmacological and chemogenetic techniques have been previously used to deconstruct fear memory and behavior using paradigms such as contextual fear conditioning, implicating the role of the dorsal hippocampus and several neurotransmitters. This study utilized a 2×2 experimental design to examine the interaction between cre-dependent DREADDs-mediated excitation of the dorsal hippocampus and 8-OH-DPAT, a 5-HT1A receptor agonist, on conditioned fear responses in a TRAP2 mouse model. A 2-way ANOVA showed the significant effect of DPAT on freezing behavior (F(1, 15) = 14.57, p = 0.0017). There was no significant main effect of CNO (F(1, 15) = 2.176 , p = 0.1609) and no significant interaction between CNO and DPAT (F(1, 15) = 0.5793, p = 0.4584). The results of the immunohistochemistry staining suggest that the virus did not express. These findings suggest that 5-HT1A receptors activated by DPAT modulate fear memory, as suggest by previous literature. Dependent upon the reason for lack of viral expression, the results show that CNO induced activation of the dorsal hippocampal engram stabilize fear response or that there was no recombined DREADDs virus. These findings have possible implications in future experiments perfecting the use of the TRAP2 DREADDs model and in the pharmacological treatment of fear conditions.

Posted in Symposium 2025 on May 1, 2025.