Featured Paper of the Month – May 2019. Addiction is a disorder of behavioral control and learning. While this may reflect pre-existing propensities, drug use also clearly contributes by causing changes in outcome processing in prefrontal and striatal regions. This altered processing is associated with behavioral deficits, including changes in learning. These areas provide critical input to midbrain dopamine… [Read More]
Dopamine D3R antagonist VK4-116 attenuates oxycodone self-administration and reinstatement without compromising its antinociceptive effects.
Featured Paper of the Month – April 2019. Opioid use disorders are currently a serious health problem worldwide and yet prescription opioids remain as the most effective medications to treat pain. VK4-116, a highly selective dopamine D3 receptor antagonist, significantly inhibited acquisition of oxycodone self-administration behaviors and decreased oxycodone seeking in several rodent models. VK4-116… [Read More]
Molecular Adaptations in the Rat Dorsal Striatum and Hippocampus Following Abstinence-Induced Incubation of Drug Seeking After Escalated Oxycodone Self-Administration.
Featured Paper of the Month – March 2019. Abuse of opioids including oxycodone is very prevalent in the US. Researchers in the laboratory of Jean Lud Cadet in the NIDA IRP have shown that when rats are given access to oxycodone for several hours, some of the rats will increase the amount of the drug… [Read More]
Deletion of the type 2 metabotropic glutamate receptor increases heroin abuse vulnerability in transgenic rats.
Featured Paper of the Month – February 2019. Despite extensive research in the past decades, little is known about the etiology of opioid addiction. In this study, Xi and colleagues found that genetic deletion of mGluR2, a glutamate receptor subtype, in rats caused an increase in brain dopamine responses to heroin and in opioid reward,… [Read More]
AP-MALDI Mass Spectrometry Imaging of Gangliosides Using 2,6-Dihydroxyacetophenone.
Featured Paper of the Month – January 2019. Gangliosides are complex glycosphingolipids and have been implicated in brain development, neuritogenesis, memory formation, synaptic transmission and aging. Disruptions in ganglioside metabolism has been linked to several diseases such as Niemann-Pick C, and Gaucher disease types II, Alzheimer disease and Guillain-Barre syndrome. GD1s are the most abundant… [Read More]
Ventral midbrain astrocytes display unique physiological features and sensitivity to dopamine D2 receptor signaling.
Featured Paper of the Month – December 2018. Astrocytes are ubiquitous CNS cells that support tissue homeostasis through ion buffering, neurotransmitter recycling, and regulation of CNS vasculature. Yet, despite the essential functional roles they fill, very little is known about the physiology of astrocytes in the ventral midbrain, a region that houses dopamine-releasing neurons and… [Read More]
Selective Brain Distribution and Distinctive Synaptic Architecture of Dual Glutamatergic-GABAergic Neurons
Featured Paper of the Month – Novermber 2018. Root and Zhang et al. (from Dr. Morales’ lab) identified throughout the brain concentrated populations of glutamate and GABA co-transmitting neurons in ventral tegmental area, entopeduncular, and supramammillary nuclei. Single axon terminals from these neurons form a common synaptic architecture that co-transmit glutamate and GABA from distinct… [Read More]
The novel ghrelin receptor inverse agonist PF-5190457 administered with alcohol: preclinical safety experiments and a phase 1b human laboratory study.
Featured Paper of the Month – October 2018. Understanding the neurobiological substrates of excessive alcohol consumption may substantially facilitate efforts to develop better treatments. The cross-talk between the gastrointestinal and central nervous systems, often referred to as the gut–brain axis, is a promising yet underexplored domain in this regard. Ghrelin is a hormone primarily produced… [Read More]
Selective Activation of Striatal NGF-TrkA/p75NTR/ MAPK Intracellular Signaling in Rats That Show Suppression of Methamphetamine Intake 30 Days following Drug Abstinence
Featured Paper of the Month – September 2018. Methamphetamine addiction is a public health threat throughout the world. Investigators in Dr. Cadet’s laboratory in the intramural program have developed a rat model of methamphetamine addiction that includes one of the psychiatric criteria used to make that diagnosis in humans. In that model, they used footshocks… [Read More]
Role of Anterior Intralaminar Nuclei of Thalamus Projections to Dorsomedial Striatum in Incubation of Methamphetamine Craving.
Featured Paper of the Month – August 2018. Methamphetamine seeking progressively increases after withdrawal from drug self-administration, a phenomenon termed incubation of methamphetamine craving. We previously found that D1R-mediated dopamine transmission in dorsomedial striatum plays a critical role in this incubation phenomenon. Here, we used neuroanatomical and neuropharmacological methods in rats to demonstrate that an… [Read More]
