Breathing-driven prefrontal oscillations regulate maintenance of conditioned-fear evoked freezing independently of initiation.

Brain-body interactions are thought to be essential in emotions but their physiological basis remains poorly understood. In mice, regular 4 Hz breathing appears during freezing after cue-fear conditioning. Here we show that the olfactory bulb (OB) transmits this rhythm to the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) where it organizes neural activity.

Harnessing olfactory bulb oscillations to perform fully brain-based sleep-scoring and real-time monitoring of anaesthesia depth.

Real-time tracking of vigilance states related to both sleep or anaesthesia has been a goal for over a century. However, sleep scoring cannot currently be performed with brain signals alone, despite the deep neuromodulatory transformations that accompany sleep state changes. Therefore, at heart, the operational distinction between sleep and wake is that of immobility and movement, despite numerous situations in which this one-to-one mapping fails.

From necessity to sufficiency in memory research: when sleep helps to understand wake experiences.

Memory is the ability to adapt our behavior by using the stored information, previously encoded. The first investigations of the neuronal bases of the memory trace concerned its properties (location, cellular and molecular mechanisms, among others). However, to understand how this is achieved at the scale of neurons, we must provide evidence about the necessity of a neuronal subpopulation to support the memory trace, but also its sufficiency.

Explicit memory creation during sleep demonstrates a causal role of place cells in navigation.

Hippocampal place cells assemblies are believed to support the cognitive map, and their reactivations during sleep are thought to be involved in spatial memory consolidation. By triggering intracranial rewarding stimulations by place cell spikes during sleep, we induced an explicit memory trace, leading to a goal-directed behavior toward the place field. This demonstrates that place cells' activity during sleep still conveys relevant spatial information and that this activity is functionally significant for navigation.

Both chronic treatments by epothilone D and fluoxetine increase the short-term memory and differentially alter the mood status of STOP/MAP6 KO mice.

Recent evidence underlines the crucial role of neuronal cytoskeleton in the pathophysiology of psychiatric diseases. In this line, the deletion of STOP/MAP6 (Stable Tubule Only Polypeptide), a microtubule-stabilizing protein, triggers various neurotransmission and behavioral defects, suggesting that STOP knockout (KO) mice could be a relevant experimental model for schizoaffective symptoms. To establish the predictive validity of such a mouse line, in which the brain serotonergic tone is dramatically imbalanced, the effects of a chronic fluoxetine treatment on the mood status of STOP KO mice were characterized.