Increased Cocaine Motivation Is Associated with Degraded Spatial and Temporal Representations in IL-NAc Neurons
| Autor: | Ilana B. Witten, Esteban A. Engel, Courtney M. Cameron, Jung Yoon Choi, Malavika Murugan |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Male
0301 basic medicine Period (gene) Drug-Seeking Behavior Infralimbic cortex Self Administration Craving Context (language use) Optogenetics Nucleus accumbens Article Nucleus Accumbens Extinction Psychological Rats Sprague-Dawley Cocaine-Related Disorders 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Cocaine Animals Medicine Rats Long-Evans Calcium Signaling Neurons Motivation business.industry General Neuroscience Extinction (psychology) Rats 030104 developmental biology medicine.anatomical_structure Space Perception medicine.symptom business Self-administration Neuroscience 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Neuron |
| ISSN: | 0896-6273 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.04.015 |
| Popis: | Craving for cocaine progressively increases in cocaine users during drug-free periods, contributing to relapse. The descending projection from the infralimbic cortex to the nucleus accumbens shell (IL-NAc) is thought to inhibit cocaine seeking. However, it is not known if and how IL-NAc neurons contribute to the increased motivation associated with a drug-free period. We first performed cellular resolution imaging of IL-NAc neurons during a drug-seeking test in rats that had been trained to self-administer cocaine. This revealed neurons with spatial selectivity within the cocaine-associated context, an overall decrease in activity around the time of cocaine-seeking, and an inverse relationship between cocaine-seeking-related activity and subsequent cocaine motivation. Interestingly, all of these properties were reduced by a drug-free period. To determine if the effect of IL-NAc activity on drug seeking depended on the drug-free period, we transiently activated this projection. This resulted in reduced drug seeking, regardless of the drug-free period. Taken together, this work suggests that a drug-free period may enhance cocaine motivation in part by reducing the representation in IL-NAc neurons of the drug-related context or drug-seeking behavior, without fundamentally altering the projection’s ability to inhibit drug seeking. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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