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Featured Paper of the Month – Novermber 2018
Published in Cell Reports by Root, David H; Zhang, Shiliang; Barker, David J; Miranda-Barrientos, Jorge; Liu, Bing; Wang, Hui-Ling; Morales, Marisela

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
Published in Molecular Psychiatry by Lee, Mary R; Tapocik, Jenica D; Ghareeb, Mwlod; Schwandt, Melanie L; Dias, Alexandra A; Le, April N; Cobbina, Enoch; Farinelli, Lisa A; Bouhlal, Sofia; Farokhnia, Mehdi; Heilig, Markus; Akhlaghi, Fatemeh; Leggio, Lorenzo

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
Published in Neuropsychopharmacology by Torres, Oscar V; Jayanthi, Subramaniam; McCoy, Michael T; Cadet, Jean Lud

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
Published in The Journal of Neuroscience by Li, Xuan; Witonsky, Kailyn R; Lofaro, Olivia M; Surjono, Felicia; Zhang, Jianjun; Bossert, Jennifer M; Shaham, Yavin

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
Published in Elife by Sadacca, Brian F; Wied, Heather M; Lopatina, Nina; Saini, Gurpreet K; Nemirovsky, Daniel; Schoenbaum, Geoffrey

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…