Topic: dopamine system

Understanding the effects of scarcity and uncertainty on the developing brain and behavior has been a major challenge for neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Currently, over millions of households with children and adolescents worldwide experience insecure and uncertain access to food, a.k.a. food insecurity. The goal of our work is to investigate if transient food insecurity experience during the juvenile-adolescent developmental period has lasting effects in adult learning, decision making, and dopamine system in a mouse model. We manipulated feeding schedules from postnatal day(P)21 to 4

Although the dopamine system’s involvement in both action control and conveying reward-related information, it is understudied how these two functions are integrated. Using a rewarded go/no-go paradigm to examine the integration of these functions, a previous study demonstrated that self-initiated actions influence reward-related dopamine release in the striatum. We expanded this work by comparing self- and signal-initiated actions, since dopamine is strongly recruited by environmental signals. Furthermore, some studies define action requirements for ‘no-go’ trials as immobility, others as wit

Schizophrenia, a complex neuropsychiatric condition impacting 0.5-1% of adults, manifests through positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms affecting emotions, thought processes, and perception. Onset typically occurs from late adolescence to early adulthood, with genetic and early-life environmental factors implicated in its strongly neurodevelopmental origin. The dopamine system plays a central role in schizophrenia's pathogenesis, with dopamine 2 receptor antagonists as the first line of treatment since the 1950s. Numerous studies highlight abnormal dopamine functions in schizophrenia pati