Université de Fribourg

Four individually identified paired dopamine neurons signal reward in larval Drosophila

Rohwedder, Astrid ; Wenz, Nana L. ; Stehle, Bernhard ; Huser, Annina ; Yamagata, Nobuhiro ; Zlatic, Marta ; Truman, James W. ; Tanimoto, Hiromu ; Saumweber, Timo ; Gerber, Bertram ; Thum, Andreas S.

In: Current Biology, 2016, vol. 26, no. 5, p. 661–669

Dopaminergic neurons serve multiple functions, including reinforcement processing during associative learning [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12]. It is thus warranted to understand which dopaminergic neurons mediate which function. We study larval Drosophila, in which only approximately 120 of a total of 10,000 neurons are dopaminergic, as judged by the expression of tyrosine...

Université de Fribourg

Infusion of brain-derived neurotrophic factor into the ventral tegmental area switches the substrates mediating ethanol motivation

Ting-A-Kee, Ryan ; Vargas-Perez, Hector ; Bufalino, Mary-Rose ; Bahi, Amine ; Dreyer, Jean-Luc ; Tyndale, Rachel F. ; Kooy, Derek van der

In: European Journal of Neuroscience, 2012, p. -

Recent work has shown that infusion of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) into the ventral tegmental area (VTA) promotes a switch in the mechanisms mediating morphine motivation, from a dopamine-independent to a dopamine-dependent pathway. Here we showed that a single infusion of intra-VTA BDNF also promoted a switch in the mechanisms mediating ethanol motivation, from a dopamine-dependent...