Publication Date:
2009-04-25
Description:
Natural rewards and drugs of abuse can alter dopamine signaling, and ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopaminergic neurons are known to fire action potentials tonically or phasically under different behavioral conditions. However, without technology to control specific neurons with appropriate temporal precision in freely behaving mammals, the causal role of these action potential patterns in driving behavioral changes has been unclear. We used optogenetic tools to selectively stimulate VTA dopaminergic neuron action potential firing in freely behaving mammals. We found that phasic activation of these neurons was sufficient to drive behavioral conditioning and elicited dopamine transients with magnitudes not achieved by longer, lower-frequency spiking. These results demonstrate that phasic dopaminergic activity is sufficient to mediate mammalian behavioral conditioning.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Tsai, Hsing-Chen -- Zhang, Feng -- Adamantidis, Antoine -- Stuber, Garret D -- Bonci, Antonello -- de Lecea, Luis -- Deisseroth, Karl -- K99 NS065009/NS/NINDS NIH HHS/ -- R01 DA021880/DA/NIDA NIH HHS/ -- R01 MH087592/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2009 May 22;324(5930):1080-4. doi: 10.1126/science.1168878. Epub 2009 Apr 23.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Neuroscience Program, W080 Clark Center, 318 Campus Drive West, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19389999" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Action Potentials
;
Animals
;
*Behavior, Animal
;
*Conditioning (Psychology)
;
Dopamine/*metabolism
;
Electrodes, Implanted
;
Genetic Vectors
;
Light
;
Mice
;
Mice, Transgenic
;
Neurons/*physiology
;
Patch-Clamp Techniques
;
Reward
;
Rhodopsin/genetics
;
Transduction, Genetic
;
Ventral Tegmental Area/cytology/*physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
