I am thrilled to see my postdoctoral work finally published in @NatureNeuro ! (free access here: . We used in vivo ephys and a new behavioral paradigm to elucidate what the PFC represents when mice face danger. These are the main findings of our work: 🧵

RT @SENC_: 📰 Mario Martín-Fernández @mmf_89 del @HMar_research, ha sido distinguido con el prestigioso SENC–Tatiana Foundation Young Invest….

RT @SENC_: 🧠 The Executive Board of #SENC is pleased to announce that the Tatiana Foundation Young Investigator Award, promoted in collabor….

RT @LMPrida: Having fun at @CSHL with @MValero87 and @mmf_89 training Ephys to next generations! And we even got some ripples!!! 🧠 waves ht….

RT @CyrilHerrylab: 🧠🇦🇹 The @CyrilHerrylab is at #FENS2024! Our latest science will be showcased 👇 We are also looking for new talented lab….

Looking forward to this symposium! Come join us at FENS on the 27th of June at 9:45!.

RT @BGarcialab: A fantastic way to close the scientific year with the 1st @HMar_research Neuroscience Christmas Meeting. Thanks to all the….

RT @acnavasolive: Calentando motores para el Xmas meeting @MValero87 @SaraMederos_ @jakefwatson @mmf_89 @Chris_Lisgaras 🎄🧠 .

RT @Carmelo_Quarta: We are recruiting!. If you are interested in single cell biology, neuroendocrinology and hypothalamic circuits, please….

RT @BGarcialab: The deadline for the POSTDOC POSITION available in our lab is extended until 31st December. We are looking for motivated ca….

RT @sandra_tanja: Are you enjoying SfN and curious about prefrontal cortex codes? Come join us in this session this afternoon!.

RT @LMPrida: 🔔Our new 📝 with @EnrRodSeb is out in @NatureNeuro Using topological analysis we show that ripple waveforms can be represented….

Also, this wouldn’t have been possible without the help of collaborators (especially @AnaPMenegolla), and the trust of Cyril @CyrilHerrylab in this project! Thanks!.

There is more to the article (Figure 5 and many supplementary figures), but these are the main findings. I hope you find this study interesting and do not doubt contacting me if you have any questions or comments you would like to share (mario.martin-fernandez@inserm.fr).

Consistently, when we inhibited the activity of the PFC mice kept eliciting defensive responses but failed more at selecting the correct ones. This suggests that the PFC is not necessarily for response expression, but for the selection of the most adaptive one in each situation

Interestingly, the danger representation was present in the PFC in error trials, while the threat-identity representation was not. We believe that this suggests that, during error trials, mice understand that they are in danger but fail to recognize the identity of the threat

Consistently, we observed specific dimensions where all threats had a similar projection. But, interestingly, also dimensions where each threat had a specific representation. Therefore, we found both specific and general threat representations in different dimensional spaces

But, at the level of the population we observed that the patterns of activity generalized across threats. We attribute this generalization across threats to the presence of a shared representation of danger (or the defensive state elicited once danger is recognized)

With this paradigm we could look at the neuronal activity in the PFC and see if it was specific for each threat or general across dangerous situations. At the level of the single neuron, we observed that most of the neurons were not specific or general, but something in between…

For this we developed a new behavioral paradigm in which mice faced 3 different threatening situations, and based on their location and the tone presented, had to select the correct defensive response in each case (we called this paradigm the ‘multi input-output paradigm’)

We soon realized that using the traditional paradigms we were not going to be able to answer this question. But we hypothesized that, if we had a paradigm in which mice faced different threatening situations, we could address whether the neuronal activity was general or specifc