Waves of c-Fos and Arc Proteins Expression in Neuronal Populations of the Hippocampus in Response to a Single Episode of New Experience

Abstract

Accumulation of c-Fos and Arc proteins in neurons in different regions of the hippocampus after single trial of contextual fear conditioning was studied by using immunohistochemical staining. We found that the dynamics of the c-Fos and Arc expression has a biphasic pattern: the first peak was observed in 15-30 min after learning and the second less pronounced peak in 1-3 h. Induction of Arc occurred earlier than c-Fos and the overall dynamics of the two waves slightly varied in the dentate gyrus and hippocampal CA1 and CA3 fields. The findings open the possibility of mapping the cognitive neural networks of the brain with higher temporal resolution and draw attention to fluctuations of hippocampal activity after a single brief episode of new experience.

Amygdala stimulation ameliorates memory impairments and promotes c‐Fos activity in fimbria‐fornix‐lesioned rats

“…Our data show as well, that the training in the water maze increases the number of c-Fos positive nuclei at the DG of dorsal hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex even in the FF group, which is consistent with previous memory study reports (Carter, Mifsud, & Reul, 2015;Ivashkina, Toropova, Ivanova, Chekhov, & Anokhin, 2016).…”

Exploring terra incognita of cognitive science: Lateralization of gene expression at the frontal pole of the human brain

“…In the group of neuronal genes with a strongly lateralized expression, it is worth noting C-FOS and NPAS4 (Figure 2A, 2B, respectively). Both genes show rapid experience-dependent increase in expression levels and are widely used as markers of neuronal plasticity in functional molecular brain map- ping in mice (Clayton, 2000;Ivashkina, Toropova, Ivanov, Chekhov, & Anokhin, 2016;X. Sun & Lin, 2016), and also in primate and human brain studies (Caston-Balderrama, Cameron, & Hoffman, 1998;Kaczmarek, Zangenehpour, & Chaudhuri, 1999;Nakagami, Watakabe, & yamamori, 2013;Okuno & Miyashita, 1996;Rakhade et al, 2005).…”

Immediate Early Genes, Memory and Psychiatric Disorders: Focus on c-Fos, Egr1 and Arc

“…arc expression is under regulation of Egr1 (Li et al, 2005 ). It is well characterized that the arc mRNA is transported to the dendrites (Fujimoto et al, 2004 ; Steward et al, 2015 ) and is usually used as marker for neural activity (Chowdhury et al, 2006 ; Shepherd et al, 2006 ; Li et al, 2015 ; Ivashkina et al, 2016 ). In this sense, the post-synaptic dendrites are enriched with arc mRNA in contrast to the absence at the pre-synaptic axons (Moga et al, 2004 ; Dynes and Steward, 2012 ; #6010; Steward et al, 2015 ).…”