Addiction changes prefrontal cortex regulation of the nucleus accumbens, including reduced ability to induce long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). This important potential mechanism of impaired prefrontal regulation of behaviour has been shown only for cocaine. Here we show that animals trained to self-administer heroin demonstrate impaired LTP and LTD in the core of the ...

This study used immunohistochemical methods to determine if the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is involved in the extinction of a conditioned taste aversion (CTA). As rats reached 90% reacceptance of a tastant (saccharin: SAC) that had previously been associated with lithium chloride-induced malaise, c-Fos protein expression increased dramatically as compared to animals with active CTAs, anima...

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays an important role in memory. By maintaining a working memory buffer, neurons in prelimbic (PL) mPFC may selectively contribute to learning associations between stimuli that are separated in time, as in trace fear conditioning (TFC). Until now, evidence for this bridging role was largely descriptive. Here we used optogenetics to silence neurons in the PL...

Fear extinction requires coordinated neural activity within the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Any behavior has a transcriptomic signature that is modified by environmental experiences, specific genes are involved in functional plasticity synaptic wiring during fear extinction. Here, we investigated effects of optogenetic manipulations prelimbic (PrL) pyramidal neurons gene expre...