Drug seeking

Pre-clinical studies on drug addiction and relapse often overlooked volitional social interactions, which are of critical importance in human addiction. Recently, it has been demonstrated that social choice-based voluntary abstinence in rats attenuates the emergence of incubation of methamphetamine (Meth) craving relative to rats subjected to a forced abstinence. In the current study we investigated the molecular mechanisms by which social choice-based voluntary abstinence prevents the incubation of craving. An important mechanism driving cue-induced craving from psychostimulants in forced abs

Learned associations between the rewarding effects of drugs and the context in which they are experienced are decisive for precipitated drug-seeking and relapse in addiction. Such associative memories are stored in sparse and highly discriminative populations of concomitantly activated neurons defining drug-recruited ensembles. In this study, we explore the dynamics of recruitment of these ensembles through the encoding, strengthening and expression of cocaine-context associative memories. Additionally, we characterize the intrinsic (phenotypical) or acquired (plastic) cellular properties that