Classical conditioning, which combines stimulation of a row of facial vibrissae (conditioned stimulus, CS) with a tail shock (unconditioned stimulus, UCS) expands the representation of “trained” whiskers and increases GABAergic measures in the hollows of “trained” barrels in the first somatosensory cortex (SI) of adult mouse. This study investigated how the appearance of the emotional effect of aversive learning (CS+UCS), i.e. aversive conditioned vocalization, affected the expression of puncta of a prominent high-affinity GABA plasma membrane transporter GAT-1 in the barrel cortex of mice 24 h after learning. We detected that application of aversive stimulation to the tail evoked of 6 – 18 kHz audible vocalization episodes. The aversive vocalization conditioned responses (CRs) during the interval in anticipation of the UCS in the first session of CS+UCS training were the largest in number and longest in duration in CS+UCS mice. Learning led to increased expression (54%) of neuronal and astroglial (GAT-1) puncta in the “trained” barrel hollows compared to controls. The electron microscopic observations confirmed that immunoreactivity for GAT-1+ puncta was localized: in single synaptic terminals present on symmetric synaptic specialization, on symmetric synapses of doublesynapse spines, and on astrocytic processes. Our data provide a causal link between vocalization conditioning, GAT-1 localized on GABAergic terminals and astrocyte networks and learning– dependent plasticity in the layer 4 of the adult SI cortex. MNiSW grant NN401018833 to ES.
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