Publications related to Mesolimbic pathway

White adipose tissue distribution and amount are associated with increased white matter connectivity

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Gabriel Girard, Elda Fischi Gomez, Philipp Johannes Koch, Liana Okudzhava

Obesity represents a significant public health concern and is linked to various comorbidities and cognitive impairments. Previous research indicates that elevated body mass index (BMI) is associated with structural changes in white matter (WM). However, a ...

Wiley2024

Striatal Dopamine Signals and Reward Learning

Carl Petersen, Sylvain Crochet, Parviz Ghaderi, Mauro Pulin, Anthony Pierre Robert Renard, Christos Sourmpis, Pol Bech Vilaseca, Meriam Malekzadeh, Robin François Virginien Dard, Yanqi Liu

We are constantly bombarded by sensory information and constantly making decisions on how to act. In order to optimally adapt behavior, we must judge which sequences of sensory inputs and actions lead to successful outcomes in specific circumstances. Neuro ...

Oxford Univ Press2023

A striatal circuit balances learned fear in the presence and absence of sensory cues

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Michael Kintscher

During fear learning, defensive behaviors like freezing need to be finely balanced in the presence or absence of threat-predicting cues (conditioned stimulus, CS). Nevertheless, the circuits underlying such balancing are largely unknown. Here, we investiga ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Mitofusin-2 in nucleus accumbens D2-MSNs regulates social dominance and neuronal function

Bernard Schneider, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, Olivia Zanoletti, Elias Georges Gebara, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Simone Astori, Alessandro Chioino, Sriparna Ghosal, Eva Ramos Fernandez

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a brain hub regulating motivated behaviors, including social competitiveness. Mitochondrial function in the NAc links anxiety with social competitiveness, and the mitochondrial fusion protein mitofusin 2 (Mfn2) in NAc neurons ...

2023

Plasticity of sensory representations in the posterior insular cortex during fear learning

Denys Osypenko

Aversively-motivated associative learning allows animals to avoid harm and thus ensures survival. Aversive learning can be studied by the fear learning paradigm, in which an innocuous sensory stimulus like a tone (conditioned stimulus, CS), acquires a nega ...

EPFL2023

The Development of Aptamer-Coupled Microelectrode Fiber Sensors (apta-?FS) for Highly Selective Neurochemical Sensing

Fabien Sorin

The selective and sensitive sensing of neurochemicals is essential to decipher in-brain chemistry underlying brain pathophysiology. The recent development of flexible and multifunctional polymer-based fibers has been shown useful in recording and modulatin ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Linking connectivity of deep brain stimulation of nucleus accumbens area with clinical depression improvements: a retrospective longitudinal case series

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Maria Giulia Preti, Thuy Anh Khoa Nguyen, Katrin Petermann, Simona Leserri

Treatment-resistant depression is a severe form of major depressive disorder and deep brain stimulation is currently an investigational treatment. The stimulation's therapeutic effect may be explained through the functional and structural connectivities be ...

Springer Heidelberg2024

Acute TNF alpha levels predict cognitive impairment 6-9 months after COVID-19 infection

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Alessandra Griffa, Alexandre Cionca, Idris Guessous

Background: A neurocognitive phenotype of post-COVID-19 infection has recently been described that is characterized by a lack of awareness of memory impairment (i.e., anosognosia), altered functional connectivity in the brain's default mode and limbic netw ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2023

Glutathione in the nucleus accumbens regulates motivation to exert reward-incentivized effort

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Lijing Xin, Ioannis Zalachoras, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Fiona Hollis, Pascal Steiner, Alina Veronika Irene Strasser, Eva Ramos Fernandez

Emerging evidence is implicating mitochondrial function and metabolism in the nucleus accumbens in motivated performance. However, the brain is vulnerable to excessive oxidative insults resulting from neurometabolic processes, and whether antioxidant level ...

2022

eNAMPT actions through nucleus accumbens NAD + /SIRT1 link increased adiposity with sociability deficits programmed by peripuberty stress

Johan Auwerx, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Wei Huang, Ioannis Zalachoras, Sriparna Ghosal, Laia Morato Fornaguera, Lei Cao

Obesity is frequently associated with impairments in the social domain, and stress at puberty can lead to long-lasting changes in visceral fat deposition and in social behaviors. However, whether stress-induced changes in adipose tissue can affect fat-to-b ...

2022

Stimulation of medial amygdala GABA neurons with kinetically different channelrhodopsins yields opposite behavioral outcomes

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Aiste Baleisyte

The medial amygdala (MeA) receives pheromone information about conspecifics and has crucial functions in social behaviors. A previous study showed that activation of GABA neurons in the postero-dorsal MeA (MeApd) with channelrhodopsin-2(H)(134R) (ChR2) sti ...

CELL PRESS2022

Meshing of Spiny Neuronal Morphologies using Union Operators

Felix Schürmann, Marwan Muhammad Ahmed Abdellah, Elvis Boci, Nadir Roman Guerrero, Juan José García Cantero, Alessandro Enrico Foni

Neurons are characterized by thin and long interleaving arborizations in which creating accurate mesh models of their cellular membranes is challenging. While union operators are central for CAD/CAM modeling and computer graphics applications, their applic ...

2022

Dopamine Dynamics in Reward-based Learning

Jun Huang

Dopamine signals are thought to be important for reward-based learning and appear to play important roles in regulating synaptic plasticity in the nucleus accumbens and the striatum. However, the precise neuronal circuit mechanisms underlying the learning ...

EPFL2022

Opposite effects of stress on effortful motivation in high and low anxiety are mediated by CRHR1 in the VTA

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Ioannis Zalachoras, Mandy Meijer

Individuals frequently differ in their behavioral and cognitive responses to stress. However, whether motivation is differently affected by acute stress in different individuals remains to be established. By exploiting natural variation in trait anxiety in ...

2022

A conditional glutamatergic synaptic vesicle marker for Drosophila

Evelyne Ruchti, Brian Donal McCabe

Glutamate is a principal neurotransmitter used extensively by the nervous systems of all vertebrate and invertebrate animals. It is primarily an excitatory neurotransmitter that has been implicated in nervous system development, as well as a myriad of brai ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC2022

High synaptic threshold for dendritic NMDA spike generation in human layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons

James Gonzalo King, Suraj Honnuraiah

Neurons receive synaptic input primarily onto their dendrites. While we know much about the electrical properties of dendrites in rodents, we have only just started to describe their properties in the human brain. Here, we investigate the capacity of human ...

2022

Anatomical and functional characterization of neocortical circuits involved in transforming whisker sensory processing into goal-directed licking

Georgios Foustoukos

The choice of an action upon perception of an external stimulus, arriving at a sensory organ of an animal, depends on previous experiences and outcomes throughout its life. In the rodent brain, the underlying mechanisms involved in simple sensorimotor tran ...

EPFL2022

Reward boosts reinforcement-based motor learning

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Julie Duqué

Besides relying heavily on sensory and reinforcement feedback, motor skill learning may also depend on the level of motivation experienced during training. Yet, how motivation by reward modulates motor learning remains unclear. In 90 healthy subjects, we i ...

2021

MorphoSONIC: A morphologically structured intramembrane cavitation model reveals fiber-specific neuromodulation by ultrasound

Silvestro Micera, Esra Neufeld, Elena Vicari, Théo Lemaire

Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Stimulation (LIFUS) holds promise for the remote modulation of neural activity, but an incomplete mechanistic characterization hinders its clinical maturation. Here we developed a computational framework to model intramembr ...

CELL PRESS2021

The role of medial amygdala inhibitory neurons in regulating social behavior

Aiste Baleisyte

Aggression is an evolutionary conserved social behavior that is necessary for an animalÂŽs survival. The neural substrates coordinating aggression are known to exist in the amygdala and the hypothalamus. While the medial amygdala (MeA) and the ventrolatera ...

EPFL2021