BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Behav. Neurosci.
Sec. Emotion Regulation and Processing
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2025.1649361
Purkinje cell activity changes in cerebellar subregions during fear conditioning
Provisionally accepted
- Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Bochum, Germany
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The cerebellum has been recently implicated in modulating fear behavior. The collective activity of Purkinje cells (PCs) across cerebellar regions during fear conditioning remains unexplored. In this brief report we implemented the targeted recombination in active populations (TRAP) system to investigate intracerebellar PC activity during cue dependent fear conditioning in mice. Purkinje cell activity was reduced in areas previously implicated in controlling aversive emotions, which included cerebellar subregions Crus I and II and lobule VI with more pronounced changes in the left cerebellar hemisphere and increases in the lobule VIII subareas in the right hemisphere. Additional PC activity increases related to motor function were observed from the right hemispheric subregions of the paraflocculus and decreases in the left copula pyramidis. These findings underscore the importance of examining the contribution of cerebellar subregions in the context of fear learning, highlighting the potential lateralization of cerebellar fear emotions.
Keywords: Fear conditioning, Cerebellum, Neuronal activity, c-fos, TRAP, Purkinje cell
Received: 18 Jun 2025; Accepted: 17 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mark, Pakusch and Nair. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Melanie D Mark, melanie.mark@rub.de
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