Amygdala to nucleus accumbens excitatory transmission facilitates reward seeking

By Garret D. Stuber, Dennis R. Sparta, A. Stamatakis, W. van Leeuwen, J. E. Hardjoprajitno, Saemi L. Cho, K. Tye, K. Kempadoo, Feng Zhang, Karl Deisseroth and 1 more. Nature, 2011

650 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) has a crucial role in emotional learning irrespective of valence. The BLA projection to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is thought to modulate cue-triggered motivated behaviours, but our understanding of the interaction between these two brain regions has been limited by the inability to manipulate neural-circuit elements of this pathway selectively during behaviour. To circumvent this limitation, we used in vivo optogenetic stimulation or inhibition of glutamatergic fibres from the BLA to the NAc, coupled with intracranial pharmacology and ex vivo electrophysiology. Here we show that optical stimulation of the pathway from the BLA to the NAc in mice reinforces behavioural responding to earn additional optical stimulation of these synaptic inputs. Optical stimulation of these glutamatergic fibres required intra-NAc dopamine D1-type receptor signalling, but not D2-type receptor signalling. Brief optical inhibition of fibres from the BLA to the NAc reduced cue-evoked intake of sucrose, demonstrating an important role of this specific pathway in controlling naturally occurring reward-related behaviour. Moreover, although optical stimulation of glutamatergic fibres from the medial prefrontal cortex to the NAc also elicited reliable excitatory synaptic responses, optical self-stimulation behaviour was not observed by activation of this pathway. These data indicate that whereas the BLA is important for processing both positive and negative affect, the glutamatergic pathway from the BLA to the NAc, in conjunction with dopamine signalling in the NAc, promotes motivated behavioural responding. Thus, optogenetic manipulation of anatomically distinct synaptic inputs to the NAc reveals functionally distinct properties of these inputs in controlling reward-seeking behaviours.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18f251f9bc069a11142184fe9ffd7d67680d3843

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Citations in the corpus

Activation of VTA GABA neurons disrupts reward consumption (2012, positive): “For in vivo optical stimulation experiments mice were first injected unilaterally in the VTA with virus and then implanted with a chronic optical fiber directly above either the ipsilateral VTA or NAc (+1.0 AP, ±1.0 ML, −4.0 DV), as described previously (Sparta et al., 2011; Stuber et al., 2011).”
Optogenetic tools for analyzing the neural circuits of behavior (2011, background): “One recent study attempted to determine what role the speciﬁc neural pathway connecting two regions involved in emotion-related learning [the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc)] plays in the generation of motivated behavior [81].”
Closed-loop and activity-guided optogenetic control. (2015, positive): “, 2011) or inhibited (Tye et al., 2011; Stuber et al., 2011) is useful for establishing necessity and sufficiency of anatomically defined cells in driving specific behaviors.”
Beyond simple models of self-control to circuit-based accounts of adolescent behavior. (2015, background): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. PS66CH12-Casey ARI 11 November 2014 13:52 suppress striatal activity via indirect inputs through the prefrontal cortex (Stuber et al. 2011).”
The Neurobiology of Anhedonia and Other Reward-Related Deficits (2011, background): “In addition, optogenetic inhibition of glutamatergic projections from the BLA to NAc decreased motivated responding for sucrose [83].”