Norepinephrine (NE) is an easily oxidized neurotransmitter that is found throughout the brain. Considerable evidence suggests that it plays an important role in neurocircuitry related to fear and anxiety responses. In certain subregions of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), NE is found in large amounts. In this work we probed differences in electrically evoked release of NE and its...

While dopamine input to the dorsal striatum is well-known to be critical for action selection, including alcohol-motivated behaviors, it is unknown whether changes in phasic dopamine accompany these behaviors. Long-term alcohol abuse is believed to promote alterations in the neurocircuitry of reward learning in both ventral and dorsal striatum, potentially through increasing dopamine release. U...

Repeated exposure to psychostimulant drugs produces long-lasting changes in dendritic structure, presumably reflecting a reorganization in patterns of synaptic connectivity, in brain regions that mediate the psychomotor activating and incentive motivational effects of these drugs, including the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex. However, repeated exposure to psychostimulant drugs also fac...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventral capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS) reduces symptoms of intractable obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but the mechanism of action is unknown. OCD is characterized by avoidance behaviors that fail to extinguish, and DBS could act, in part, by facilitating extinction of fear. We investigated this possibility by using auditory fear conditioning in rats, ...

The origins of extrinsic projections to the guinea pig dorsal and ventral cochlear nuclei were identified by examining the retrograde transport of horseradish peroxidase conjugated to wheatgerm agglutinin following its injection into each of these divisions. Major projections originated in periolivary regions of the superior olivary complex, the contralateral cochlear nucleus and the inferior c...

Restricted feeding (RF) schedules provide a cycle of fasting and feeding each day and induce circadian rhythms in food-anticipatory activity. In addition, daily rhythms in the expression of circadian clock genes, such as rhythms in Period1 (PER1) or Period2 (PER2), are also shifted in many brain areas that are important for the regulation of motivation and emotion. In order to differentiate bra...

Introduction: The dorsal striatum plays an important role in the control of motor activity and learning processes within the basal ganglia circuitry. Furthermore, recent works have suggested functional differentiation between subregions of the dorsal striatum Methods: The present study examined the effects of bilateral electrolytic lesions of the dorsomedial striatum on motor behavior and learn...

Post-mortem investigations have implicated cerebral astrocytes immunoreactive (-IR) for glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) in the etiopathology of depression and suicide. However, it remains unclear whether astrocytic subpopulations IR other markers are similarly affected. Astrocytes to vimentin (VIM) display different regional densities than GFAP-IR healthy brain, so may be differently alt...