{"doi":"10.7554/elife.88733.1","title":"Periaqueductal gray activates antipredatory neural responses in the amygdala of foraging rats","abstract":"Abstract Pavlovian fear conditioning studies propose that the interaction between the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) functions as a prediction error mechanism for fear memory formation. However, their roles in responding to naturalistic predatory threats, where predictive cues are ambiguous and do not afford reiterative trial-and-error learning, remain unexplored. We conducted single-unit recordings in rats engaged in an ‘approach food-avoid predator’ behavior, characterizing dPAG and BLA neurons responsive to a looming robot predator. Opto-stimulation of dPAG induced fleeing and increased BLA activity. Notably, BLA neurons activated by dPAG stimulation displayed an immediate response to the robot and heightened synchronous activity compared to non-responsive BLA neurons. Furthermore, anterograde and retrograde tracer injections into the dPAG and BLA, respectively, indicate that the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT) may mediate dPAG-to-BLA neurotransmission. Our findings suggest that dPAG and BLA interactions, potentially via the PVT, underlie an innate antipredatory defensive mechanism.","journal":null,"year":2023,"id":400031,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9538,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":650388,"name":"Mi-Seon Kong","orcid":"0000-0001-8970-7034","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1148373,"name":"Sanggeon Park","orcid":"0000-0003-2083-2536","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":513610,"name":"Jeiwon Cho","orcid":"0000-0001-6903-3562","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":363914,"name":"Jeansok J. Kim","orcid":"0000-0001-7964-106X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":363913,"name":"Eun Joo Kim","orcid":"0000-0002-8499-9135","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":46,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:20:00.023537Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}