Reward and aversion in a heterogeneous midbrain dopamine system

By S. Lammel, B. Lim, R. Malenka. 2013

746 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ventral tegmental area (VTA) is a heterogeneous brain structure that serves a central role in motivation and reward processing. Abnormalities in the function of VTA dopamine (DA) neurons and the targets they influence are implicated in several prominent neuropsychiatric disorders including addiction and depression. Recent studies suggest that the midbrain DA system is composed of anatomically and functionally heterogeneous DA subpopulations with different axonal projections. These findings may explain a number of previously confusing observations that suggested a role for DA in processing both rewarding as well as aversive events. Here we will focus on recent advances in understanding the neural circuits mediating reward and aversion in the VTA and how stress as well as drugs of abuse, in particular cocaine, alter circuit function within a heterogeneous midbrain DA system.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

Coordinated and Compartmentalized Neuromodulation Shapes Sensory Processing in Drosophila (2015, positive): “Intriguingly, midbrain dopaminergic neurons responsive to punishment and reward also project to distinct targets in the mammalian brain and display a similar functional opponency as a consequence of reciprocal network interactions (Cohen et al., 2012; Lammel et al., 2012, 2014; Lerner et al., 2015).”
Converging circuits mediate temperature and shock aversive olfactory conditioning in Drosophila. (2014, neutral): “In insects and mammals, dopamine neurons have been shown to respond to different rewarding, as well as punishing, stimuli [37–39].”
The Brain on Drugs: From Reward to Addiction. (2015, background): “Recent pseudorabies virus-based methods for monosynaptic network tracing have shown that neurons from many brain areas synapse on distinct VTA DA neuron subpopulations (Lammel et al., 2014) and that neurons from the dorsal raphe (DR) provide the majority of monosynaptic inputs (Ogawa et al.”
Intact-Brain Analyses Reveal Distinct Information Carried by SNc Dopamine Subcircuits (2015, background): “However, not all midbrain DA neurons appear to encode similar information in their activity patterns (Bromberg-Martin et al., 2010; Lammel et al., 2014; Roeper, 2013).”
A genetically-encoded fluorescent sensor enables rapid and specific detection of dopamine in flies, fish, and mice (2018, methodology): “Therefore, genetically-encoded GRABDA 585 sensors provide a novel tool to explore patterns of DA release from genetically 586 distinct DAN types, thereby facilitating the understanding of how they may be 587 functionally specialized for different physiological and behavioral processes 588 (Lammel et”
Backpropamine: training self-modifying neural networks with differentiable neuromodulated plasticity (2018, methodology): “These include: implementing multiple neuromodulatory signals (each with their own inputs and outputs), as seems to be the case in the brain (Lammel et al., 2014; Howe & Dombeck, 2016; Saunders et al., 2018); introducing more complex tasks that could make full use of the flexibility of the framework,”