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Speaker: Dr. Lilian Yuan
Assistant Professor
Department of Neuroscience & Pharmacology,
University of Minnesota
Time: 15:00pm -16:30pm
Date: Oct 13, 2011
Venue: Institute of psychology, CAS, Conference Hall (First floor of north building)
Abstract: The limbic system refers to several functionally and anatomically interconnected nuclei and cortical structures. It controls mood, emotion, and motivation, and is particularly critical for learning and memory. Dysfunction of this system results in psychiatric disorders and dementia. Employing animal models, we investigated how environmental stress dynamically regulated persistent neuronal activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and mPFC-dependent working memory. We further identified a molecular target that mediated the biphasic changes induced by stress. These results may provide insightful information for therapeutic strategies to prevent or reverse stress-induced cognitive deficits. In a different line of research, we discovered a novel peptide that was highly expressed in the limbic circuits that are involved in fear learning. Knocking out such a key molecule in mice resulted in reduced contextual fear conditioning. Current focus is on identification of the receptor and down-stream signaling pathway, which we believe will shed light on possible therapeutic intervention of fear dysregulation and anxiety disorders.
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