Granule cells control recovery from classical conditioned fear responses in the zebrafish cerebellum

Abstract

Although previous studies show that the cerebellum is involved in classical fear conditioning, it is not clear which components in the cerebellum control it or how. We addressed this issue using a delayed fear-conditioning paradigm with late-stage zebrafish larvae, with the light extinguishment as the conditioned stimulus (CS) and an electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus (US). The US induced bradycardia in the restrained larvae. After paired-associate conditioning with the CS and US, a substantial population of the larvae displayed CS-evoked bradycardia responses. To investigate the roles of the zebrafish cerebellum in classical fear conditioning, we expressed botulinum toxin or the Ca²⁺ indicator GCaMP7a in cerebellar neurons. The botulinum-toxin-dependent inhibition of granule-cell transmissions in the corpus cerebelli (CCe, the medial lobe) did not suppress the CS-evoked bradycardia response, but rather prolonged the response. We identified cerebellar neurons with elevated CS-evoked activity after the conditioning. The CS-evoked activity of these neurons was progressively upregulated during the conditioning and was downregulated with repetition of the unpaired CS. Some of these neurons were activated immediately upon the CS presentation, whereas others were activated after a delay. Our findings indicate that granule cells control the recovery from conditioned fear responses in zebrafish.