The anterior portion of rodent agranular insular cortex consists of a ventral periallocortical region (AIv) and a dorsal proisocortical region (AId). Each of these two cortical areas has distinct efferent connections, but in certain brain areas their projection fields are partially or wholly overlapping. Bilateral projections to layers I, III and VI of medial frontal cortex originate in the dor...

The cortical and subcortical forebrain connections of the marmoset prefrontal cortex (PFC) were examined by injecting the retrograde tracer, choleratoxin, and the anterograde tracer, biotin dextran amine, into four sites within the PFC. Two of the sites, the lateral and orbital regions, had previously been shown to provide functionally dissociable contributions to distinct forms of behavioral f...

Central nociceptin/orphanin FQ (N/OFQ)-expressing neurones are abundantly expressed in the hypothalamus and limbic system and are implicated in the regulation of activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) and stress responses. We investigated the role of the endogenous N/OFQ receptor (NOP) system using the nonpeptidic NOP antagonist, JTC-801 [N-(4-amino-2-methylquinolin-6-yl)-2-(...

There is evidence that the dorsal midline thalamus is involved in the seizures of limbic epilepsy. However, little is known about the inhibitory synaptic function in this region. In the present study, inhibitory postsynaptic currents (IPSCs) mediated by GABA(A) receptors were recorded from the mediodorsal (MD) and paraventricular (PV) nuclei from control and epileptic animals. In the MD, the sp...

BACKGROUND Maternal deprivation (MD) in rodents is an important neurodevelopmental model for studying a variety of behavioral changes which closely resemble the symptoms of schizophrenia in humans. SUBJECTS AND METHODS To determine whether early-life stress leads to changes in the limbic system structures: the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens, 9-day-old Wistar rats were exposed to 24 hour M...

Multisensory and sensorimotor integrations are usually considered to occur in superior colliculus and cerebral cortex, but few studies proposed the thalamus as being involved in these integrative processes. We investigated whether the organization of the thalamocortical (TC) systems for different modalities partly overlap, representing an anatomical support for multisensory and sensorimotor int...

Cortical projection neurons are classified by hodology in corticocortical, commissural and corticofugal subtypes. Although cortical projection neurons had been regarded as only glutamatergic neurons, recently corticocortical GABAergic projection neurons has been also reported in several species. Here, we demonstrate corticofugal GABAergic projection neurons in the mouse frontal cortex. We emplo...

Quantitative autoradiography of benzodiazepine (BZ) receptors and competitive reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction were used to characterize changes in BZ binding and GABA receptor subunit transcription levels associated with the anxiolytic effects of A alprazolam. Effects were assessed on punished and non-suppressed water consumption using a lick suppression (Vogel) paradigm. 3 Alpr...