Light tunes long-term threat avoidance behavior
 

Marcos L. Aranda, PhD
Research Associate
Department of Neurobiology 
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL, USA  

This conference is part of the the IRCM Early-Career Scientist Seminar Series (ECS3), a groundbreaking initiative whose mission is to showcase early career scientists. This is a great opportunity to discover the exciting projects of these researchers in training in front of a multidisciplinary audience.

About this conference
Animals must constantly scan their environment for imminent threats to their safety. However, they must also integrate their past experiences across long timescales to assess the potential recurrence of new threats. Though visual inputs are critical for the detection of environmental danger, whether and how visual information shapes an animal’s assessment of whether a new threat is likely to reappear in a given context is unknown. In this work, we developed a behavioral assessment of long-term threat avoidance behavior where animals will avoid a familiar location where they previously experienced a single threat exposure. This avoidance behavior highly sensitive and lasts for multiple days. Intriguingly, we find that the melanopsin-expressing, intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells tune this behavior via a perihabenula-nucleus accumbens circuit distinct from canonical visual threat detection circuits in a sex-dependent manner. These findings define a long-term threat avoidance behavior that is shaped by a defined retinal cell type based on prior experience.

About Marcos L. Aranda
Dr. Aranda obtained his PhD in the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He then joined the lab of Dr. Schmidt at Northwestern University to study how light impacts physiology and behavior. During this time, he aims to understand the basis of diverse subtypes of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) combining morphological and physiological studies, and large-scale transcriptomic approaches to investigate the ipRGC subtypes. In a parallel project, Dr. Aranda developed a paradigm to study the effects of light on long-term threat avoidance behavior.  He focuses on studying how sex and estrous cycle tune these light-driven anticipatory behaviors in mice.

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