Limbic motor seizures in animals, analogous to complex partial seizures in humans, result in a consistent activation of the mediodorsal thalamus (MD) and, with prolonged seizures, damage to MD. This study examined the functional role of MD in focally evoked limbic motor seizures in the rat. GABA- and glutamate (Glu)-mediated synaptic transmissions in MD were evaluated for an influence on seizur...

The anterograde and retrograde transport of horseradish peroxidase was used to study the anatomical organization of visceral and limbic terminal fields in the insular cortex. Following injections into the ventroposterolateral parvicellular (VPLpc) and ventroposteromedial parvicellular (VF'Mpc) visceral relay nuclei of the thalamus, dense anterograde and retrograde labeling was present in the po...

NMDA receptor (NMDAR) antagonists, such as phencyclidine, ketamine, or dizocilpine (MK-801) are commonly used in psychiatric drug discovery in order to model several symptoms of schizophrenia, including psychosis and impairments in working memory. In spite of the widespread use of NMDAR antagonists in preclinical and clinical studies, our understanding of the mode of action of these drugs on br...

Dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is considered to be an important factor contributing to a decrease in cognitive performance of schizophrenia patients. The medial PFC (mPFC) is innervated by the hippocampus/subiculum, and the subiculum-mPFC pathway is known to be involved in various cognitive processes. Glutamate-containing subicular axons innervate cortical pyramidal neurons and inte...

We have previously shown that fear extinction is accompanied by an increase of synaptic efficacy in inputs from the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) and mediodorsal thalamus (MD) to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and that disrupting these changes to mPFC synaptic transmission compromises extinction processes. The aim of this study was to examine whether these extinction-related changes undergo f...

Although it has been shown that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the mediodorsal thalamus (MD) are critical for goal-directed instrumental performance, much remains unknown about the respective contributions of these structures to action selection. The current study assessed the effects of post-training BLA and MD lesions on several tests of instrumental action selection. We found that MD dam...

Groups of pregnant rats were injected with two successive daily doses of 3H-thymidine from gestational days 13 and 14 (E13 + 14) until the day before birth (E21 + 22). With this progressively delayed comprehensive labelling procedure we determined the time of origin of neurons in the nuclei of the epithalamus, thalamus, and ventral thalamus. The zona incerta, subthalamic nucleus, reticular nucl...