Featured Paper of the Month – February 2020. Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs) are a popular chemogenetic technology for manipulation of neuronal activity in uninstrumented awake animals with potential for human applications as well. The prototypical DREADD agonist clozapine N-oxide (CNO) lacks brain entry and converts to clozapine, making it difficult to apply in… [Read More]
Featured Paper of the Month
Orbitofrontal cortex is selectively activated in a primate model of attentional bias to cocaine cues.
Featured Paper of the Month – January 2020. Drug-associated cues can intrude upon thinking, making relapse more likely. A measure of how strongly cues engage cognitive resources is called attentional bias. This is reflected in slightly longer response times on trials on a stimulus response task when drug cues are present compared to non-drug cues…. [Read More]
The Ventral Tegmental Area has calbindin neurons with the capability to co-release glutamate and dopamine into the nucleus accumbens.
Featured Paper of the Month – December 2019. Unraveling the mystery of the glutamate-dopamine connection The ventral tegmental area (VTA) is a brain structure that participates in the rewarding effects of drug use, but the role of specific neurons within the VTA is unclear. Scientists at NIDA’s Intramural Research Program conducted a set of studies… [Read More]
Activation of a lateral hypothalamic-ventral tegmental circuit gates motivation
Featured Paper of the Month – November 2019. Motivated states such as food-seeking and consumption are essential for survival. A brain region called the lateral hypothalamus (LH) plays a fundamental role in regulating feeding and reward-related behaviors, but the contributions of specific neuronal subpopulations in the LH have not been thoroughly characterized. Here we examine… [Read More]
Intrinsic Insular-Frontal Networks Predict Future Nicotine Dependence Severity.
Featured Paper of the Month – October 2019. Smoking remains a major public health burden, with approximately 20% of the world’s population engaging in regular smoking. Given the high relapse rate among smokers who enter treatments programs, early identification of vulnerable individuals, before the conversion from casual experimentation to regular smoking and addiction, is an… [Read More]
Novel and Potent Dopamine D 2 Receptor Go-Protein Biased Agonists.
Featured Paper of the Month – September 2019. The discovery of functionally biased and physiologically beneficial ligands directed toward G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) has provided the impetus to design dopamine D2 receptor (D2R) targeted molecules that may be therapeutically advantageous for the treatment of certain neuropsychiatric or basal ganglia related disorders. Here we describe the synthesis… [Read More]
Discriminative stimuli are sufficient for incubation of cocaine craving.
Featured Paper of the Month – August 2019. In abstinent drug addicts, cues formerly associated with drug-taking experiences gain relapse-inducing potency (‘incubate‘) over time. Animal models of incubation may help develop treatments to prevent relapse, but these models have ubiquitously focused on the role of conditioned stimuli (CSs) signaling drug delivery. Discriminative stimuli (DSs) are unique in that they exert stimulus-control over… [Read More]
Nucleus Accumbens Drd1-Expressing Neurons Control Aggression Self-Administration and Aggression Seeking in Mice.
Featured Paper of the Month – July 2019. Aggression is often comorbid with neuropsychiatric diseases, including drug addiction. One form, appetitive aggression, exhibits symptomatology that mimics that of drug addiction and is hypothesized to be due to dysregulation of addiction-related reward circuits. However, our mechanistic understanding of the circuitry modulating appetitive operant aggression is limited…. [Read More]
Incubation of Cocaine Craving After Intermittent-Access Self-administration: Sex Differences and Estrous Cycle.
Featured Paper of the Month – June 2019. We examined whether binge cocaine intake has an impact on drug craving after abstinence and whether it has differential effects between male and female rats. We used an intermittent access cocaine self-administration to mimic binge intake and compare it with a continuous access self-administration. The intermittent access… [Read More]
Expectancy-Related Changes in Dopaminergic Error Signals Are Impaired by Cocaine Self-Administration.
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]
