News Main

Beyond abstinence and relapse II: momentary relationships between stress, craving, and lapse within clusters of patients with similar patterns of drug use

Featured Paper of the Month – May 2021
Published in Psychopharmacology by Leigh V Panlilio, et al. in the NIDA IRP Real-world Assessment, Prediction, and Treatment Unit.

Despite the popular conception that people in treatment for opioid addiction either become abstinent or relapse into a spiral of continuous drug use, many actually continue using drugs to some intermediate degree. Some use drugs frequently, some use sporadically, and some use very rarely. In this paper, we show that groups of people who share similar patterns of use also tend to be alike in other ways. For example, we find that those who use sporadically are unusual in that they do not seem to be driven by drug craving, but tend to use simply because they were offered drugs…

A target-agnostic screen identifies approved drugs to stabilize the endoplasmic reticulum-resident proteome

Hot Off the Press – April 30, 2021 Published in Cell Reports by Mark Henderson and Kathleen Trychta, et al. In the paper by Henderson et al., we developed a high throughput screen to identify molecules that can stabilize protein homeostasis inside of cells (brain, muscle, liver, etc) during pathological states. The screen was based… [Read More]

Ketogenic Diet Reduces Alcohol Withdrawal Symptoms in Humans and Alcohol Intake in Rodents

Hot Off the Press – April 26, 2021 Published in Science Advances by Corinde Wiers and Leandro Vendruscolo, et al. Previous studies reported that people with alcohol use disorder (AUD) use less glucose and more acetate as a source of energy in the brain. This is because alcohol is broken down by the liver into… [Read More]

Time-Varying Functional Connectivity Decreases as a Function of Acute Nicotine Abstinence

Featured Paper of the Month – April 2021
Published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging by John Fedota, Ph.D. and Thomas Ross, Ph.D., et al. in the NIDA IRP Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience of Addiction Section.

Quitting smoking is hard. This is largely due to the nicotine withdrawal syndrome. Withdrawal from cigarettes is characterized by craving, bad feelings and losses of attention. Importantly, these negative symptoms are known to fluctuate wildly in time. Inspired by this, NIDA scientists applied a technique that allowed us to look at how communication across the entire brain fluctuated over time during smoking and withdrawal. Twenty-five smokers came to NIDA twice each. During the first visit they smoked a cigarette and were not in withdrawal. Before the second visit, they did not smoke for 2 days and so were in peak withdrawal. At each visit they underwent a function magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan…

Dissecting the Role of GABA Neurons in the VTA versus SNr in Opioid Reward

Featured Paper of the Month – March 2021
Published in The Journal of Neuroscience by Ewa Galaj, Ph.D. Ph.D. and Zheng-Xiong Xi, M.D., Ph.D., et al. in the NIDA IRP Addiction Biology Unit.

Opioid reward has long been believed to be mediated by inhibition of VTA GABA interneurons that disinhibits DA neurons. In this study, we found that GABA neurons of the neighboring substantia nigra pars reticulata play a more important role in opioid reward and relapse than VTA GABA interneurons…

Past experience shapes the neural circuits recruited for future learning

Hot Off the Press – February 18, 2021 Past is prologue, at least that is the saying. Yet modern behavioral neuroscience, particularly in animals, strives to minimize the effect of past experience, using young and typically naïve subjects for testing. This is done in an effort to understand brain function without the confounding effects of… [Read More]

Sigma-1 receptor chaperones rescue nucleocytoplasmic transport deficit seen in cellular and Drosophila ALS/FTD models

Hot Off the Press – February 9, 2021 A receptor called the sigma-1 receptor, which was discovered at NIDA IRP, plays an important role in regulating the cargo transport between the cellular nucleus and cytoplasm that is dysfunctional in neurodegenerative diseases including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The authors demonstrate and validate… [Read More]

Novel Fluorescent Ligands Enable Single-Molecule Localization Microscopy of the Dopamine Transporter

Featured Paper of the Month – February 2021
Published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience by Guthrie, Daryl A; Herenbrink, Carmen Klein; Lycas, Matthew Domenic; Ku, Therese; Bonifazi, Alessandro; DeVree, Brian T; Mathiasen, Signe; Javitch, Jonathan A; Grimm, Jonathan B; Lavis, Luke; Gether, Ulrik; Newman, Amy Hauck

The dopamine transporter (DAT) functions to control dopaminergic neurotransmission and is a target for therapeutic agents, including ADHD medications, as well as abused substances, such as cocaine. Here, we develop new fluorescently labeled ligands as promising new tools for studying DAT localization and regulation with single-molecule resolution…

2021 NIDA IRP FARE Winners

Congratulations to our 2021 FARE (Fellows Award for Research Excellence) winners: Harsh Deshpande, Ewa Galaj, Evan Hart, Therese Ku, Brenton Laing, Renata Marchette, Adrienne McGinn, Jorge Miranda Barrientos, and David Reiner. They will each receive a $1500 travel stipend to attend a scientific meeting to present their research and gave a talk at the virtual… [Read More]

Evolving schema representations in orbitofrontal ensembles during learning

Hot Off the Press – January 3, 2021 Learning what to learn about and generalizing from one situation to another is arguably one of the most fundamental abilities that distinguishes higher intelligence. The effects of the resultant schemas can be seen in simple motor or sensory processing, in which learning one skill facilitates acquisition of… [Read More]