Compartment-specific plasticity in the lateral amygdala during fear learning

Local dendritic integration of synaptic inputs crucially shapes somatic output. While work in vitro has provided valuable insights into the mechanisms underlying dendritic integration, how experience affects the relationship between behaviorally relevant somatic and dendritic activity in single neurons remains largely unknown. Using deep brain two-photon Ca2+ imaging, we investigate how sensory stimuli are represented in somata and dendrites of Lateral Amygdala principal neurons and how these representations develop over the course of auditory fear learning. We observe a higher rate of dendrite-specific activity during tone presentations in naïve animals, which was abolished by chemogenetic inhibition of somatostatin-expressing interneurons, suggesting that these neurons gate dendritic integration of tone inputs. We also find that fear learning induces tone response plasticity that is bidirectional in somata but largely unidirectional in dendrites and identified a neuronal population with uncoupled somatic and dendritic plasticity of tone response. Overall, our results indicate that fear learning induces compartment-specific plasticity and suggests that inputs conveying tone information are processed locally in the amygdala during auditory fear learning.