Publication Date:
2012-12-14
Description:
Ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons in the brain's reward circuit have a crucial role in mediating stress responses, including determining susceptibility versus resilience to social-stress-induced behavioural abnormalities. VTA dopamine neurons show two in vivo patterns of firing: low frequency tonic firing and high frequency phasic firing. Phasic firing of the neurons, which is well known to encode reward signals, is upregulated by repeated social-defeat stress, a highly validated mouse model of depression. Surprisingly, this pathophysiological effect is seen in susceptible mice only, with no apparent change in firing rate in resilient individuals. However, direct evidence--in real time--linking dopamine neuron phasic firing in promoting the susceptible (depression-like) phenotype is lacking. Here we took advantage of the temporal precision and cell-type and projection-pathway specificity of optogenetics to show that enhanced phasic firing of these neurons mediates susceptibility to social-defeat stress in freely behaving mice. We show that optogenetic induction of phasic, but not tonic, firing in VTA dopamine neurons of mice undergoing a subthreshold social-defeat paradigm rapidly induced a susceptible phenotype as measured by social avoidance and decreased sucrose preference. Optogenetic phasic stimulation of these neurons also quickly induced a susceptible phenotype in previously resilient mice that had been subjected to repeated social-defeat stress. Furthermore, we show differences in projection-pathway specificity in promoting stress susceptibility: phasic activation of VTA neurons projecting to the nucleus accumbens (NAc), but not to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), induced susceptibility to social-defeat stress. Conversely, optogenetic inhibition of the VTA-NAc projection induced resilience, whereas inhibition of the VTA-mPFC projection promoted susceptibility. Overall, these studies reveal novel firing-pattern- and neural-circuit-specific mechanisms of depression.〈br /〉〈br /〉〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3554860/" target="_blank"〉〈img src="https://static.pubmed.gov/portal/portal3rc.fcgi/4089621/img/3977009" border="0"〉〈/a〉 〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3554860/" target="_blank"〉This paper as free author manuscript - peer-reviewed and accepted for publication〈/a〉〈br /〉〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Chaudhury, Dipesh -- Walsh, Jessica J -- Friedman, Allyson K -- Juarez, Barbara -- Ku, Stacy M -- Koo, Ja Wook -- Ferguson, Deveroux -- Tsai, Hsing-Chen -- Pomeranz, Lisa -- Christoffel, Daniel J -- Nectow, Alexander R -- Ekstrand, Mats -- Domingos, Ana -- Mazei-Robison, Michelle S -- Mouzon, Ezekiell -- Lobo, Mary Kay -- Neve, Rachael L -- Friedman, Jeffrey M -- Russo, Scott J -- Deisseroth, Karl -- Nestler, Eric J -- Han, Ming-Hu -- F31 MH095425/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- F32 MH096464/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- K99 MH094405/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- R01 MH092306/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- R25 GM064118/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/ -- T32 MH020016/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- T32 MH087004/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- T32 MH096678/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- England -- Nature. 2013 Jan 24;493(7433):532-6. doi: 10.1038/nature11713. Epub 2012 Dec 12.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics, Friedman Brain Institute, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York 10029, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23235832" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Depression/etiology/*physiopathology
;
Dopaminergic Neurons/*metabolism
;
Food Preferences
;
Male
;
Mesencephalon/*cytology
;
Mice
;
Neural Pathways
;
Nucleus Accumbens/physiology
;
Optogenetics
;
Phenotype
;
Prefrontal Cortex/physiology
;
*Social Behavior
;
Stress, Psychological/complications/*physiopathology
;
Sucrose/administration & dosage
;
Time Factors
;
Ventral Tegmental Area/physiology
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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