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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…

Featured Paper of the Month – June 2018
Published in Cerebral Cortex by Jaime, Saul; Gu, Hong; Sadacca, Brian F; Stein, Elliot A; Cavazos, Jose E; Yang, Yihong; Lu, Hanbing

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
Published in Neuropsychopharmacology by Solis, Ernesto Jr; Cameron-Burr, Keaton T; Shaham, Yavin; Kiyatkin, Eugene A

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…