Abstract
Treatment of emotional disorders involves the promotion of extinction processes, which are defined as the learned reduction of fear. The molecular mechanisms underlying extinction have only begun to be elucidated. By employing genetic and pharmacological approaches in mice, we show here that extinction requires downregulation of Rac-1 and cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5), and upregulation of p21 activated kinase-1 (PAK-1) activity. This is physiologically achieved by a Rac-1–dependent relocation of the Cdk5 activator p35 from the membrane to the cytosol and dissociation of p35 from PAK-1. Moreover, our data suggest that Cdk5/p35 activity prevents extinction in part by inhibition of PAK-1 activity in a Rac-1–dependent manner. We propose that extinction of contextual fear is regulated by counteracting components of a molecular pathway involving Rac-1, Cdk5 and PAK-1. Our data suggest that this pathway could provide a suitable target for therapeutic treatment of emotional disorders.
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Acknowledgements
We thank B. Samuels for reading the manuscript and for critical discussion, all members of the Tsai lab for helpful advice, M. Nikolic for the pPAK-1T212 antibody and S. Tonegawa for the dominant-negative PAK-1 construct. L.-H.T. is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This work was partially supported by a US National Institutes of Health grant (NS051874) to L.-H.T. This work was also partially supported by a US National Institute of Mental Health grant MH073669 to J.R., and a Humboldt/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft fellowship to F.S. and A.F., respectively, and by funds from the European Neuroscience Institute Goettingen to A.F. The European Neuroscience Institute is jointly funded by the Medical School University Goettingen and the Max Planck Society.
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The studies were conceived and designed by F.S., A.F., J.R. and L.-H.T. F.S., A.F., X.W., C.S., R.N. and J.R. contributed to the experiments in this work. The paper was written by A.F. and L.-H.T.
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Sananbenesi, F., Fischer, A., Wang, X. et al. A hippocampal Cdk5 pathway regulates extinction of contextual fear. Nat Neurosci 10, 1012–1019 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1943
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1943
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