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Adaptive fear responses to external threats rely upon efficient relay of computations underlying contextual encoding to subcortical circuits. Brain-wide analysis of highly coactivated ensembles following contextual fear discrimination identified the dorsolateral septum (DLS) as a relay of the dentate gyrus-CA3 circuit. Retrograde monosynaptic tracing and electrophysiological whole-cell recordings demonstrated that DLS somatostatin-expressing interneurons (SST-INs) receive direct CA3 inputs. Longitudinal in vivo calcium imaging of DLS SST-INs in awake, behaving mice identified a stable population of footshock-responsive SST-INs during contextual conditioning whose activity tracked and predicted non-freezing epochs during subsequent recall in the training context but not in a similar, neutral context or open field. Optogenetic attenuation or stimulation of DLS SST-INs bidirectionally modulated conditioned fear responses and recruited proximal and distal subcortical targets. Together, these observations suggest a role for a potentially hard-wired DLS SST-IN subpopulation as arbiters of mobility that calibrate context-appropriate behavioral fear responses.

Long-term synaptic plasticity, represented by long-term depression (LTD) and long-term potentiation (LTP) comprise cellular processes that enable memory. Neuromodulators such as serotonin regulate hippocampal function, and the 5-HT4 -receptor contributes to processes underlying cognition. It was previously shown that in the CA1-region, 5-HT4 -receptors regulate the frequency-response relationship of synaptic plasticity: patterned afferent stimulation that has no effect on synaptic strength (i.e., a θm-frequency), will result in LTP or LTD, when given in the presence of a 5-HT4 -agonist, or antagonist, respectively. Here, we show that in the dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3 regions of freely behaving rats, pharmacological manipulations of 5-HT4 -receptors do not influence responses generated at θm-frequencies, but activation of 5-HT4 -receptors prevents persistent LTD in mossy fiber (mf)-CA3, or perforant path-DG synapses. Furthermore, the regulation by 5-HT4 -receptors of LTP is subfield-specific: 5-HT4 -receptor-activation prevents mf-CA3-LTP, but does not strongly affect DG-potentiation. These data suggest that 5-HT4 -receptor activation prioritises information encoding by means of LTP in the DG and CA1 regions, and suppresses persistent information storage in mf-CA3 synapses. Thus, 5-HT4 -receptors serve to shape information storage across the hippocampal circuitry and specify the nature of experience-dependent encoding. © 2016 The Authors Hippocampus Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., (© 2016 The Authors Hippocampus Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)