Serotonin 5-HT 2C receptor knockout in mice attenuates fear responses in contextual or cued but not compound context-cue fear conditioning

Previous findings have proposed that drugs targeting 5-HT 2C receptors could be promising candidates in the treatment of trauma- and stress-related disorders. However, the reduction of conditioned freezing observed in 5-HT 2C receptor knock-out (KO) mice in previous studies could alternatively be accounted for by increased locomotor activity. To neutralize the confound of individual differences in locomotor activity, we measured a ratio of fear responses during versus before the presentation of a conditioned stimulus previously paired with a footshock (as a fear measure) by utilizing a conditioned licking suppression paradigm. We first confirmed that 5-HT 2C receptor gene KO attenuated fear responses to distinct types of single conditioned stimuli (context or tone) independently of locomotor activity. We then assessed the effects of 5-HT 2C receptor gene KO on compound fear responses by examining mice that were jointly conditioned to a context and a tone and later re-exposed separately to each. We found that separate re-exposure to individual components of a complex fear memory (i.e., context and tone) failed to elicit contextual fear extinction in both 5-HT 2C receptor gene KO and wild-type mice, and also abolished differences between genotypes in tone-cued fear extinction. This study delineates a previously overlooked role of 5-HT 2C receptors in conditioned fear responses, and invites caution in the future assessment of molecular targets and candidate therapies for the treatment of PTSD.