Topic: pain processing

The dorsal tegmentum including the ventrolateral PAG (vlPAG) and dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) plays a critical role in controlling anxiety, fear memory formation, autonomic processes and most particularly, it is involved in descending modulation of pain processing. It has been shown that different neuron types, such as dopaminergic and serotonergic cells are part of this circuitry – besides the glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons – however their functions remained unclear. Here, we explored the neuronal activity in the vlPAG and DRN in urethane-anesthetized mice in response to different types of