Featured Paper of the Month

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 ganglioside species in the mammalian brain and consist of two structural isomers, GD1a and GD1b.Traditionally, the only way to analyze these isomers by mass spectrometry involved  extraction and thus the researcher loses information about the location of the isomers in tissue…

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 is critical for reward learning and motivated behaviors. Using a combination of whole-transcriptome sequencing, histology, slice electrophysiology, and calcium imaging, Xin et al. performed the first functional and molecular profiling of ventral midbrain astrocytes and observed numerous differences between these cells and their telencephalic counterparts, both in their gene expression profile and in their physiological properties…

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 synaptic vesicles at independent asymmetric or symmetric synapses…

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 by the stomach and known for its role in increasing appetite and food intake (the “hunger hormone”). Recent animal and human studies suggest that ghrelin may also be involved in alcohol-seeking behaviors.  In rodent experiments, blocking the ghrelin receptor suppresses alcohol seeking and consumption…

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 to represent adverse consequences that are present during the clinical course of addiction. Contingent footshocks helped the investigators to identify some rats (addicted) that continue to press a lever to get methamphetamine whereas other rats (non-addicted) suppress or stop their taking of methamphetamine in the presence of these adverse consequences…

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 interaction between the glutamatergic projection from the lateral anterior intralaminar nuclei of thalamus to dorsomedial striatum and local dopamine D1Rs plays a critical role in relapse to methamphetamine seeking after prolonged withdrawal…

Featured Paper of the Month – July 2018.

Using knowledge of the structure of the world to infer value is at the heart of model-based reasoning and relies on a circuit that includes the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Some accounts link this to the representation of biological significance or value by neurons in OFC, while other models focus on the representation of associative structure or cognitive maps. Here we tested between these accounts by recording OFC neurons in rats during an OFC-dependent sensory preconditioning task…

Featured Paper of the Month – June 2018.

Our brains always work, consciously or unconsciously. Functional connectivity MRI has identified so-called resting state brain networks (e.g. default mode network). Aberrant activity in such networks is implicated in neurological and psychiatric disorders. This work applies simultaneous electrophysiological recording and functional MRI to investigate the neurophysiological basis of the network activity…

Featured Paper of the Month – May 2018.

Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid used clinically to treat pain and as a general anesthetic. Recently, fentanyl has emerged as a recreational drug and its overdose has been linked to numerous deaths in the US. To better understand how fentanyl affects the brain, we used electrochemical techniques in rats and examined the effect of intravenous fentanyl on oxygen and glucose levels in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region implicated in reward and addiction…