Hallucinating mice and dopamine – towards mechanistic treatment targets for psychosis

Psychotic disorders are devastating conditions without any mechanistic treatment available. One major hurdle in the biological study of psychosis is the challenge of rigorously probing this condition in pre-clinical animal models. The goal of our research is to develop and exploit innovative frameworks for the study of psychosis in mice. In our present work, where we developed a cross-species computational psychiatry approach to probe hallucination-like perception. This enabled us to directly relate human and mouse behavior, and to demonstrate and dissect the causal role of striatal dopamine in hallucination-like perception. Our results suggest a neural circuit mechanism for the long-standing dopamine hypothesis of psychosis, and provide a new translational framework for the biological study of psychosis. This opens up exciting possibilities for advancing the biological understanding of psychosis and to identify mechanistic treatment targets.