Transcriptional and Epigenetic Mechanisms of Addiction

By Alfred J. Robison, E. Nestler. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2011

978 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Investigations of long-term changes in brain structure and function that accompany chronic exposure to drugs of abuse suggest that alterations in gene regulation contribute substantially to the addictive phenotype. Here, we review multiple mechanisms by which drugs alter the transcriptional potential of genes. These mechanisms range from the mobilization or repression of the transcriptional machinery — including the transcription factors ΔFOSB, cyclic AMP-responsive element binding protein (CREB) and nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) — to epigenetics — including alterations in the accessibility of genes within their native chromatin structure induced by histone tail modifications and DNA methylation, and the regulation of gene expression by non-coding RNAs. Increasing evidence implicates these various mechanisms of gene regulation in the lasting changes that drugs of abuse induce in the brain, and offers novel inroads for addiction therapy.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2085d46cb32cb4f01f42892f1feee4fff0dcbb9e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Molecular Biology

1. Nora D. Volkow
2. M. Morales
3. A. Diamond

Citations in the corpus

• The Brain on Drugs: From Reward to Addiction. (2015, background): “…drug-induced neuroplastic changes largely hinge on the epigenetic enhancement or silencing of gene expression and on epitranscriptomic (RNA editing)modulation of translation, twomechanismswhosedetails are beginning to be uncovered (Kenny, 2014; Robison and Nestler, 2011; Satterlee et al., 2014).”