Prof. Pan Bingxing’s Team Releasing the Latest Research Achievement in Nature Communications

Recently, the latest research achievement of Prof. Pan Bingxing’s team of Institute of Life Science, Nanchang University was published as Identification of a prefrontal cortex-to-amygdala pathway for chronic stress-induced anxiety in the famous academic journal Nature Communications.

Excessively prolonged work and life pressure is an important reason for many mental diseases such as anxiety disorder and depression. To interpret how pressure harms the structure and function of the brain and then causes mental diseases is an important topic of modern neuroscience and psychiatry. Through research, Prof. Pan Bingxing’s team finds that prolonged pressure can remarkably weaken the inhibitory control of the prefrontal cortex in charge of cognition and emotional regulation over the amygdala in charge of emotional expression, thus causing excessive anxiety. This weakening effect mainly occurs in the amygdala cell that receives one-way input from the prefrontal cortex. On the contrary, the weakening effect is not evident in the amygdala cell that is interactively connected with the prefrontal cortex. The research achievement is expected to provide an all-new path for precise and individualized prevention and treatment of mental diseases associated with pressure.

The release of the research achievement is another important advancement after Prof. Pan Bingxing’s team published series achievements in the famous psychiatric journal Biological Psychiatry consecutively twice in 2019. Dr. Liu Weizhu and Associate Researcher Zhang Wenhua are the first co-authors and Prof. Pan Bingxing is the corresponding author. Funded by the key project of National Natural Science Foundation of China, the research was independently completed by Institute of Life Science, Nanchang University.

Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15920-7