PhD Scientific Days 2025

Poster Session III. - R: Neurosciences

Distinct Thalamo-Cortical Inputs Define Subnucleus-Specific Information Processing in the Amygdala

Name of the presenter

Berki Péter

Institute/workplace of the presenter

HUN-REN Institute of Experimental Medicine

Authors

Peter Berki¹, Ákos Babiczky², Kinga Kocsis³, Aletta Magyar¹, Sándor Borbély¹, Antal Berényi⁴, Ferenc Mátyás¹

1: HUN-REN Institute of Experimental Medicine
2: Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
3: NYU Neuroscience Institute
4: University of Szeged

Text of the abstract

Emotional regulation is an important higher-order function of the nervous system, which plays a critical role in our daily life. During this process, external multisensory stimuli are integrated with internal (arousal, salience) signals, a mechanism essential for generating fast and adaptive behavioural responses across diverse situations. Importantly, pathological alterations of emotional regulation (e.g., mood disorders, depression, PTSD) impose substantial mental and financial burdens on our society, therefore, elucidating the underlying mechanisms behind these processes is of great importance. The amygdala is a known mediator of fear learning through computing external cues (threat) and internal (arousal-related) signals. However, fine details about these coding mechanisms remains unclear. While there is a widely known model which posits serial information processing of these signals from cortical and thalamic regions to cortical-like amygdala subnuclei (lateral and basolateral), generating an output in the central nuclei of the amygdala, evidence supporting this view is inconsistent. Recently gathered data indicate that different amygdala subnuclei receive inputs from distinct cortical and thalamic regions in a largely non-overlapping manner, and strongly suggests a more complex, subnucleus-specific parallel mode of processing. In order to reveal the exact information flow within distinct thalamic subnuclei, we carried out complex anatomical tracing experiments combined with human tractography and high-density electrophysiological recordings. We demonstrate that there is a dichotomy in the thalamo-cortico-amygdala network existing both in human and mice, which is composed of several parallel intra-amygdala routes with separate striatal outputs. Therefore, our results challenge the current view of emotional processing in the amygdala and suggests that different aspects of emotional behaviour are mediated by separate amygdala circuits.