Archival ReportBasolateral Amygdala Modulates Terminal Dopamine Release in the Nucleus Accumbens and Conditioned Responding
Section snippets
Subjects and Surgery
Male Sprague-Dawley rats (n = 9) (Harlan, Indianapolis, Indiana; 90–120 days; 260–350 g) were used and individually housed with a 12-hour light/12-hour dark cycle. Rats were surgically prepared for voltammetric recordings as described previously (10). A guide cannula was stereotaxically positioned above the NAc core (1.3–1.5 mm anterior, 1.3 mm lateral from bregma) and a bipolar stimulating electrode in the VTA (5.2 mm posterior, 1.0 mm lateral from bregma, 7 mm ventral from brain). A
Acquisition of Stimulus-Controlled Behavior
Rats learned the discriminative stimulus task over 8 to 12 sessions. A two-way repeated-measures ANOVA of the final six sessions revealed a significant main effect of session [F(5,60) = 12.52; p < .0001] and cue [F(1,60) = 42.69; p < .0001] on the percentage of cue trials with an operant response (Figure 1C). Post hoc comparisons revealed a significant difference between percent of cue trials with an operant response over the final 3 days of training (p < .05). The final training response
Discussion
We examined the contribution of BLA activity to NAc core dopamine during a cued sucrose reinforcement task. The DS, which predicted access to the reinforced lever, evoked significantly higher phasic dopamine than the NS, which predicted access to a nonreinforced lever. Pharmacological inactivation of the BLA selectively attenuated DS-evoked dopamine, concurrent with an attenuation of DS-evoked conditioned approaches. However, dopamine measured following NS onset, lever extensions, lever
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2023, Frontiers in NeuroendocrinologyCitation Excerpt :The NAc receives glutamatergic projections from the BLA to guide both basic reward-processing and associative reward learning (Day and Carelli, 2007; Setlow et al., 2002), and sends GABAergic projections to the VTA (Weitz et al., 2021). DA-expressing neurons located within the NAc release DA in response to reward-predictive stimuli in a manner that is modulated by activity in the BLA (Jones et al., 2010; Stuber et al., 2011), and input from the BLA is necessary to facilitate neuronal activity in the NAc that promotes reward-seeking behavior (Ambroggi et al., 2008). The NAc and BLA circuit in reward learning and memory is also responsive to the sex steroids: NAc and amygdalar DA release is increased after E2 replacement (Liu and Xie, 2004; Thompson and Moss, 1994) in a manner that is compounded when P4 is administered to E2-primed rats (Becker and Rudick, 1999; Dluzen and Ramirez, 1984).