Congratulations to our 2021 Mentoring Award winners! They were honored at the 9th NIDA Poster Day and Mentoring Awards ceremony on May 19, 2021. From left to right: Huilng Wang, MD, PhD – Diversity Mentoring Award; David Reiner, PhD – Postdoctoral Fellow Mentoring Award; Bruce Hope, PhD – Investigator Mentoring Award; and Jeremiah Bertz, PhD – Staff Scientist Mentoring Award.
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Ventral tegmental area GABA, glutamate, and glutamate-GABA neurons are heterogeneous in their electrophysiological and pharmacological properties
Featured Paper of the Month – August 2021
Published in European Journal of Neuroscience by Jorge Miranda-Barrientos and Marisela Morales, et al. in the NIDA IRP Neuronal Networks Section.
The ventral tegmental area (VTA) contains dopamine neurons intermixed with GABA-releasing (expressing vesicular GABA transporter, VGaT), glutamate-releasing (expressing vesicular glutamate transporter 2, VGluT2), and glutamate-GABA co-releasing (co-expressing VGluT2 and VGaT) neurons. By delivering INTRSECT viral vectors into the VTA of double vglut2-Cre/vgat-Flp transgenic mice, we targeted specific VTA cell populations for ex vivo recordings. We found that VGluT2+ VGaT- and VGluT2+ VGaT+ neurons on average had relatively hyperpolarized resting membrane potential, greater rheobase, and lower spontaneous firing frequency compared to VGluT2- VGaT+ neurons, suggesting that VTA glutamate-releasing and glutamate-GABA co-releasing neurons require stronger excitatory drive to fire than GABA-releasing neurons…
Animal Models of Drug Relapse and Craving after Voluntary Abstinence: A Review
Reviews To Read – July 2021. Our review describes recently developed rat models of relapse after voluntary abstinence, achieved either by introducing adverse consequences to drug taking or seeking or by providing mutually exclusive choices between the self-administered drug and nondrug rewards. We discuss recent neuropharmacological findings from studies using these models, future directions, and… [Read More]
Inactivation of the infralimbic cortex decreases discriminative stimulus-controlled relapse to cocaine seeking in rats
Hot Off the Press – July 7, 2021 Published in Neuropsychopharmacology by Rajtarun Madangopal and Bruce Hope, et al. in the NIDA IRP Neuronal Ensembles in Drug Addiction Section. Discriminative stimuli (DSs) play an important and understudied role in the persistent susceptibility to drug relapse. They signal drug availability (DS+) or unavailability (DS-) and control… [Read More]
Neuroendocrine Response to Exogenous Ghrelin Administration, Combined With Alcohol, in Heavy-Drinking Individuals: Findings From a Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Human Laboratory Study
Featured Paper of the Month – July 2021
Published in International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology by Mehdi Farokhnia and Lorenzo Leggio, et al. in the NIDA IRP Clinical Psychoneuroendocrinology and Neuropsychopharmacology Section.
Evidence from preclinical and clinical studies suggest that the orexigenic hormone ghrelin modulates alcohol-seeking behaviors. Accordingly, the ghrelin system is being studied as a potential pharmacotherapeutic target for alcohol use disorder (AUD). Both ghrelin and alcohol interact with a variety of endocrine pathways, especially those related to appetite, metabolism, and stress. To better understand the complex interplay between ghrelin and other hormones in the context of alcohol use, the present study examined neuroendocrine response to a supraphysiological challenge with exogenous ghrelin, combined with alcohol, in a clinically relevant sample of heavy-drinking individuals with AUD…
An excitatory lateral hypothalamic circuit orchestrating pain behaviors in mice
Hot Off the Press – June 7, 2021 Published in eLife by Justin Siemian and Yeka Aponte, et al. in the NIDA IRP Neuronal Circuits and Behavior Unit. Decades of work have revealed the lateral hypothalamus (LH) as a crucial region for orchestrating appetitive and reward-related behaviors. However, the contributions of genetically-identified lateral hypothalamic neurons to other… [Read More]
Whole brain dynamics during optogenetic self-stimulation of the medial prefrontal cortex in mice
Featured Paper of the Month – June 2021
Published in Communications Biology by Christopher Cover and Hanbing Lu, et al. in the NIDA IRP Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy Section.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can image brain dynamics while a human subject engages in a goal-directed task, it has proven extremely challenging to perform similar studies in rodents due to the difficulty in both limiting motion and mitigating stress during task performance. Herein we report a method that makes this possible: mice are cued to lick a spout to receive optogenetic stimulation. Noninvasive whole brain readout combined with circuit-specific neuromodulation opens an avenue for investigating adaptive behavior in both healthy and disease models…
2021 NIDA IRP Mentoring Awards
Congratulations to our 2021 Mentoring Award winners! They were honored at the 9th NIDA Poster Day and Mentoring Awards ceremony on May 19, 2021. From left to right: Huilng Wang, MD, PhD – Diversity Mentoring Award; David Reiner, PhD – Postdoctoral Fellow Mentoring Award; Bruce Hope, PhD – Investigator Mentoring Award; and Jeremiah Bertz, PhD – Staff Scientist Mentoring Award.
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]
