Synaptic and Behavioral Profile of Multiple Glutamatergic Inputs to the Nucleus Accumbens
By Jonathan P. Britt, F. Benaliouad, R. McDevitt, Garret D. Stuber, R. Wise, A. Bonci. Neuron, 2012
694 citations recorded by the source corpus.
SUMMARY Excitatory afferents to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are thought to facilitate reward seeking by encoding reward-associated cues. Selective activation of different glutamatergic inputs to the NAc can produce divergent physiological and behavioral responses, but mechanistic explanations for these pathway-specific effects are lacking. Here, we compared the innervation patterns and synaptic properties of ventral hippocampus, basolateral amygdala, and prefrontal cortex input to the NAc. Ventral hippocampal input was found to be uniquely localized to the medial NAc shell, where it was predominant and selectively potentiated following cocaine exposure. In vivo, bidirectional optogenetic manipulations of this pathway attenuated and enhanced cocaine-induced locomotion. Challenging the idea that any of these inputs encode motivationally-neutral information, activation of each discrete pathway reinforced instrumental behaviors. Finally, direct optical activation of medium spiny neurons proved to be capable of supporting self-stimulation, demonstrating that behavioral reinforcement is an explicit consequence of strong excitatory drive to the NAc.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/227c969faf40776fb09af3e6b7f9b9a7b4ecd8fc
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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
- Kent C. Berridge
- Morten L. Kringelbach
- Joseph E LeDoux
- Ruth Feldman
- Peter S. Dayan
- Terry E. Robinson
- Peter Carruthers
- Jaak Panksepp
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Kent C. Berridge
- Morten L. Kringelbach
- Joseph E LeDoux
- Ruth Feldman
- Jaak Panksepp
- S. Peciña
- Peter S. Dayan
- Peter Carruthers
In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Neural Circuit Motifs in Valence Processing (2018, neutral): “, 2015); (2) opposing effects of optogenetic manipulation (Britt et al., 2012; Namburi et al., 2015; Ramirez et al., 2015; Stuber et al., 2011); (3) distinct population encoding of positive or negative valence as revealed by projection-identified large-scale single-unit recordings during discriminat”
- Pleasure systems in the brain (2015, background): “Although some contrary evidence suggests that local NAc excitations also generate motivated behaviors (Britt et al., 2012; Taha and Fields, 2005), this disinhibition hypothesis at least does potentially account for many features of the NAc in motivation (Carlezon and Thomas, 2009), including the…”
- Memory Engram Cells Have Come of Age. (2015, neutral): “…stimulation (DBS) to alleviate anhedonia (Schlaepfer et al., 2008) in humans, and previous reports had also identified BLA axonal terminals onto NAcc as sufficient to support self-stimulation and reward-seeking behavior in a D1 receptor-mediated manner (Britt et al., 2012; Stuber et al., 2011).”
- Closed-loop and activity-guided optogenetic control. (2015, neutral): “…effects can be seen with optogenetic projection targeting compared with focal regional stimulation (e.g., Tye et al., 2011; Warden et al., 2012; Britt et al., 2012; Znamenskiy and Zador, 2013; reviewed in Deisseroth, 2014), it is also the case that different afferent projections of the same…”