Stephanie Trouche

Institute for Functional Genomics of Montpellier

Avoiding potentially dangerous situations is key for the survival of any organism. Throughout life, animals learn to avoid environments, stimuli or actions that can lead to bodily harm. While the neural bases for appetitive learning, evaluation and value-based decision-making have received much attention, recent studies have revealed more complex c...

Although most neurons are generated embryonically, neurogenesis is maintained at low rates in specific brain areas throughout adulthood, including the dentate gyrus of the mammalian hippocampus. Episodic-like memories encoded in the hippocampus require the dentate gyrus to decorrelate similar experiences by generating distinct neuronal representati...

By investigating the topology of neuronal co-activity, we found that mnemonic information spans multiple operational axes in the mouse hippocampus network. High-activity principal cells form the core of each memory along a first axis, segregating spatial contexts and novelty. Low-activity cells join co-activity motifs across behavioral events and e...

Both the basal amygdala (BA) and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) can participate in contextual fear, but it is unclear whether contextual fear engrams involve a direct interaction between these two brain regions. To determine whether dorsal BNST (dBNST)-projecting neurons in the BA participate in contextual fear engrams, we combined...

Sleep is essential for the regulation of neural dynamics and animal behavior. In particular, sleep is crucial for memory consolidation and emotional regulation. In turn, emotions are key to the modulation of learning processes in which sleep also plays a crucial role. Emotional processing triggers coordinated activity between neuronal populations e...

Retrieving and acting on memories of food-predicting environments are fundamental processes for animal survival. Hippocampal pyramidal cells (PYRs) of the mammalian brain provide mnemonic representations of space. Yet the substrates by which these hippocampal representations support memory-guided behavior remain unknown. Here, we uncover a direct c...

Theta oscillations reflect rhythmic inputs that continuously converge to the hippocampus during exploratory and memory-guided behavior. The theta-nested operations that organize hippocampal spiking could either occur regularly from one cycle to the next or be tuned on a cycle-by-cycle basis. To resolve this, we identified spectral components nested...

The ability to reinstate neuronal assemblies representing mnemonic information is thought to require their consolidation through offline reactivation during sleep/rest. To test this, we detected cell assembly patterns formed by repeated neuronal co-activations in the mouse hippocampus during exploration of spatial environments. We found that the re...

The hippocampus provides the brain's memory system with a subset of neurons holding a map-like representation of each environment experienced. We found in mice that optogenetic silencing those neurons active in an environment unmasked a subset of quiet neurons, enabling the emergence of an alternative map. When applied in a cocaine-paired environme...

The neural cell adhesion molecule NCAM and its association with the polysialic acid (PSA) are believed to contribute to brain structural plasticity that underlies memory formation. Indeed, the attachment of long chains of PSA to the glycoprotein NCAM down-regulates its adhesive properties by altering cell-cell interactions. In the brain, the biosyn...

The neural cell adhesion molecule NCAM and its association with the polysialic acid (PSA) are believed to contribute to brain structural plasticity that underlies memory formation. Indeed, the attachment of long chains of PSA to the glycoprotein NCAM down-regulates its adhesive properties by altering cell-cell interactions. In the brain, the biosyn...

Hippocampal adult neurogenesis contributes to key functions of the dentate gyrus, including contextual discrimination. This is due, at least in part, to the unique form of plasticity new neurons display at a specific stage of their development compared to surrounding principal neurons. In addition, the contribution newborn neurons make to dentate f...

We found that optogenetic burst stimulation of hippocampal dopaminergic fibers from midbrain neurons in mice exploring novel environments enhanced the reactivation of pyramidal cell assemblies during subsequent sleep/rest. When applied during spatial learning of new goal locations, dopaminergic photostimulation improved the later recall of neural r...

Supplemental Information to McNamara et al. 2014.

The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus plays a pivotal role in pattern separation, a process required for the behavioral task of contextual discrimination. One unique feature of the dentate gyrus that contributes to pattern separation is adult neurogenesis, where newly born neurons play a distinct role in neuronal circuitry. Moreover, the function of...

A more complete understanding of how fear extinction alters neuronal activity and connectivity within fear circuits may aid in the development of strategies to treat human fear disorders. Using a c-fos-based transgenic mouse, we found that contextual fear extinction silenced basal amygdala (BA) excitatory neurons that had been previously activated...

New granule cells are continuously generated throughout adulthood in the mammalian hippocampus. These newly generated neurons become functionally integrated into existing hippocampal neuronal networks, such as those that support retrieval of remote spatial memory. Here, we sought to examine whether the contribution of newly born neurons depends on...

In the adult brain, the dentate gyrus continuously produces new neurons that become functionally integrated into existing neural circuits. Supporting the idea that this form of plasticity contributes to memory functions, we recently found that new neurons are recruited into neuronal networks involved in retrieval of remote spatial memory and that t...

The dentate gyrus (DG), a hippocampal subregion, continuously produces new neurons in the adult mammalian brain that become functionally integrated into existing neural circuits. To what extent this form of plasticity contributes to memory functions remains to be elucidated. Using mapping of activity-dependent gene expression, we visualized in mice...

It is now widely accepted that new neurons continue to be added to the brain throughout life including during normal aging. The finding of adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a structure involved in the processing of memories, has favored the idea that newborn neurons might subserve cognitive functions. Recent work on human post-mortem tissues a...

Le cerveau des mammifères continue de produire des nouveaux neurones tout au long de la vie adulte, notamment dans le gyrus denté de l'hippocampe, une structure impliquée dans l'apprentissage et la mémoire. Le rôle précis des néo-neurones n'est pas entièrement élucidé et reste au cœur des débats. Les recherches menées lors de cette thèse ont examin...