Dheeraj S Roy, Young-Gyun Park, Minyoung E Kim, Ying Zhang, Sachie K Ogawa, Nicholas DiNapoli, Xinyi Gu, Jae H Cho, Heejin Choi, Lee Kamentsky, Jared Martin, Olivia Mosto, Tomomi Aida, Kwanghun Chung, Susumu Tonegawa
Neuronal ensembles that hold specific memory (memory engrams) have been identified in the hippocampus, amygdala, or cortex. However, it has been hypothesized that engrams of a specific memory are distributed among multiple brain regions that are functionally connected, referred to as a unified engram complex. Here, we report a partial map of the engram complex for contextual fear conditioning memory by characterizing encoding activated neuronal ensembles in 247 regions using tissue phenotyping in mice. The mapping was aided by an engram index, which identified 117 cFos+ brain regions holding engrams with high probability, and brain-wide reactivation of these neuronal ensembles by recall...
April 4, 2022: Nature Communications