Repeated cocaine exposure triggers adaptations in layer 5/6 glutamatergic neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that promote behavioral sensitization and drug-seeking behavior. While suppression of metabotropic inhibitory signaling has been implicated in these behaviors, underlying mechanisms are unknown. Here, we show that Girk/K(IR)3 channels mediate most of the GABA(B) receptor (GAB...

Long-term changes in glutamate transmission in the nucleus accumbens core (NAcore) contribute to the reinstatement of drug seeking after extinction of cocaine self-administration. Whether similar adaptations in glutamate transmission occur during heroin and cue-induced reinstatement of heroin seeking is unknown. After 2 weeks of heroin self-administration and 2 weeks of subsequent extinction tr...

bstract—Both the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal ortex (mPFC) play an important role in the negative feedack regulation of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) acivity during physiologic and behavioral stress. Moreover, hronic behavioral stress is known to affect the morphology f CA3c pyramidal neurons in the rat, by reducing total ranch number and length of apical dendrites. In the prese...

Inhibitory gating (IG) is a basic central nervous system process for filtering repetitive sensory information. Although IG deficits coincide with cognitive and emotional dysfunction in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders, limited research has been completed on the basic, functional nature of IG. Persistent IG occurs in rat prelimbic medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a crucial site for modula...

BACKGROUND Recent evidence suggests that the neural correlates of reversal learning are localised to the orbitofrontal cortex whereas studies on the contribution of the medial prefrontal cortex to this capacity have produced equivocal results. This study examines the behavioural effects of selective lesions centred on orbitofrontal, infralimbic and prelimbic cortex on serial spatial reversal le...

The rat prelimbic prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens core are critical for initiating cocaine seeking. In contrast, the neural circuitry responsible for inhibiting cocaine seeking during extinction is unknown. The present findings using inhibition of selected brain nuclei with GABA agonists show that the suppression of cocaine seeking produced by previous extinction training required activ...

The rodent stress hormone corticosterone changes neuronal activity in a slow and persistent manner through transcriptional regulation. In the rat dorsal hippocampus, corticosterone enhances the amplitude of calcium-dependent potassium currents that cause a lingering slow after-hyperpolarization (sAHP) at the end of depolarizing events. In this study we compared the putative region-dependency of...

A brain circuit that drives and gates curiosity Curiosity is what organisms to investigate each other their environment. It considered by many be as intrinsic hunger thirst, but the neurobiological mechanisms behind have remained elusive. In mice, Ahmadlou et al. found a specific population of genetically identified ?-aminobutyric acid (GABA)—ergic neurons in region called zona incerta receive ...

Enriched environmental (EE) housing dampens stress-induced alterations in neurobiological systems, promotes adaptability, and extinguishes submissive behavioral traits developed during social defeat stress (SD). In the present study, we hypothesized that enrichment before SD can confer stress resiliency and, furthermore, that neuronal activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is requisite for thi...