Dorsal and ventral hippocampal adult-born neurons contribute to context fear memory

The hippocampus contains one of the few neurogenic niches within the adult brain-the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus. The functional significance of adult-born neurons in this region has been characterized using context fear conditioning, a Pavlovian paradigm in which animals learn to associate a location with danger. Ablation or silencing of adult-born neurons impairs both acquisition and recall of contextual fear conditioning, suggesting that these neurons contribute importantly to hippocampal memory. Lesion studies indicate that CFC depends on neural activity in both the dorsal and ventral hippocampus, subregions with unique extrahippocampal connectivity and behavioral functions. Because most studies of adult neurogenesis have relied on methods that permanently ablate neurogenesis throughout the entire hippocampus, little is known about how the function of adult-born neurons varies along the dorsal-ventral axis. Using a Nestin-CreER(T2) mouse line to target the optogenetic silencer Archaerhodopsin to adult-born neurons, we compared the contribution of dorsal and ventral adult-born neurons to acquisition, recall, and generalization of CFC. Acquisition of CFC was impaired when either dorsal or ventral adult-born neurons were silenced during training. Silencing dorsal or ventral adult-born neurons during test sessions decreased context-evoked freezing but did not impair freezing in a hippocampus-independent tone-shock freezing paradigm. Silencing adult-born neurons modestly reduced generalization of fear. Our data indicate that adult-born neurons in the dorsal and ventral hippocampus contribute to both memory acquisition and recall. The comparatively large behavioral effects of silencing a small number of adult-born neurons suggest that these neurons make a unique and powerful contribution to hippocampal function.