Paper Review

The nervous and immune systems work together to help organisms adapt, such as reacting to psychological stress. But how they communicate remains a mystery.

A new study, published in Nature, titled "Psychedelic control of neuroimmune interactions governing fear," revealed this challenge by exploring how astrocytes in the amygdala—a brain region central to fear and stress processing—modulate fear behavior through a combination of genomic and behavioral screens. The research shows that astrocytes, a type of glial cell, limit stress-induced fear behavior through the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). EGFR signaling in astrocytes suppresses a pro-inflammatory signal-transduction cascade triggered by stress, which otherwise facilitates neuron-glial crosstalk and promotes fear behavior via the orphan nuclear receptor NR2F2 in amygdala neurons. The study also identifies that chronic stress leads to the recruitment of meningeal monocytes—immune cells in the brain’s protective layers—that exacerbate fear responses.

This study used Stereo-seq to identify the molecular signals that regulate astrocyte–neuron interactions within amygdala subnuclei under chronic stress. Stereo-seq detected Slc17a7+ and Slc17a6+ excitatory neurons, inhibitory neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and microglia that were evenly distributed across samples. The spatial transcriptomics analysis helped map the spatial distribution of EGFR-expressing astrocytes and NR2F2-expressing neurons in the amygdala, revealing how these cells interact under stress conditions. The researchers also utilized the amygdala spatial transcriptomic data to directly quantify the expression of cytokines associated with each activated pathway they identified.

Explore the full study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08880-9

About STOmics' Stereo-seq:
STOmics offers the most advanced spatiotemporal multi-omics technology, enabling unbiased discovery to answer biological questions in scientific research and clinical applications. Currently, we offer spatial transcriptomics solutions, including Stereo-seq v1.3 for fresh frozen samples (upgraded solution launched in October 2024), Stereo-seq OMNI for FFPE samples, Stereo-seq Large Chip Designs (LCD) for centimeter-level fresh frozen samples (now up to 2cm x 3cm), and a spatial multi-omics solution - Stereo-CITE for high-plex spatial proteo-transcriptome co-detection. Find out more: https://en.stomics.tech/