Fig. 6.

Prelimbic BDNF is critical for consolidation and expression of learned fear. (A) Mice infected with LV-GFP or LV-Cre acquired and expressed fear during cued fear conditioning. (B) One day after fear conditioning, mice were tested with CS tones. LV-Cre mice had attenuated average freezing compared with LV-GFP mice. (C) During fear testing, CS presentations across 15 tones showed less freezing in LV-Cre mice. (D) There were no differences in locomotor activity in the open field. (E) Anxiety-like (innate fear) behavior was assessed in the open field, showing no differences in time spent in the center or surround. (F) Anxiety-like behavior was similar on the elevated-plus maze. (G) All mice learned equally well on an object recognition test where all mice spent significantly more time exploring a novel object during short-term (4 h) and long-term (24 h) testing of memory (^# P < 0.05 versus familiar object). For all figures, *P < 0.05 versus LV-GFP (n = 7 per group).