Conclusions
Temporal impairment of both baseline and injury-induced adult neurogenesis enhances performance in fear discrimination in a context-dependent manner.
Methods
To test whether injury-induced newborn neurons facilitate pattern separation, hippocampus-dependent contextual fear discrimination was performed using delta-HSV-TK transgenic mice, which can temporally inhibit injury-induced neurogenesis under the control of ganciclovir.
Results
We observed that impaired neurogenesis enhanced the ability to distinguish aversive from naïve environments. In addition, this occurs most significantly following injury, but only in a context-dependent manner whereby the sequence of introducing the naïve environment from the aversive one affected the performance differentially. Conclusions: Temporal impairment of both baseline and injury-induced adult neurogenesis enhances performance in fear discrimination in a context-dependent manner.