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. 2021 Jan 28;26(9):4968–4981. doi: 10.1038/s41380-021-01024-1

Fig. 5. The increase in PAI-1 is a sufficient and necessary condition for the induction of PTSD-like memory.

Fig. 5

Fear responses, expressed as percent of time spent freezing, 24 h after conditioning in C57BL/6J mice exposed in a safe environment to the tone not predicting the threat (nonpredicting cue, a, b, e, and f) or to the environment in which the conditioning was performed (predicting context, c, d, g, and h). Immediately after the conditioning session animals received one of the following treatments: an injection of (white symbol) vehicle (Veh; NaCl 0.9% i.p.) alone or in combination with the intrahippocampal infusion of either (blue symbol) PAI-1 (240 ng/side) or (orange symbol) PAI-1 (240 ng/side) + mature BDNF (100 ng/side); an injection of (black symbol) Cort alone (2 mg/kg i.p.) or in combination with the intrahippocampal infusion of either the PAI-1 antagonist tiplaxtinin (5 ng/side, green symbol) or the vehicle of tiplaxtinin (gray symbol). Magnitude of tone conditioning represented by a normalized ratio: (tone − ((pre + post)/2))/(tone + ((pre + post)/2)) (b and f). Bonferroni/Dunn’s multiple comparisons post hoc test after ANOVA: **p < 0.001 and ***p < 0.005 vs Veh/Veh group, #p < 0.05 and ###p < 0.005 compared to Veh/PAI-1 and Cort groups. Plotted values are means ± sem.