Topic: Pitx3

Motivated behavior is characterized by a high degree of vigor, activity persistence, and effort. Nucleus Accumbens (Nacb) dopamine (DA) plays a major role in voluntary locomotion and in the activational component of motivated behaviors, including effort-related decision-making. The transcription factor Pitx3 is critical for the survival of mesolimbic DA neurons. Aphakia mice (Ak) have a mutation in Pitx3, which leads to a reduction in dorsal-striatal dopaminergic innervation and results in parkinsonian-like motor alterations. They also show a reduction in ventral-striatal DA, including Nacb. I

Pain is considered one of the most frequent non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and it usually manifests before the motor symptoms. Although not considered one of the cardinal symptoms of PD, pain affects up to 80% of PD patients and half of them report multiple types of pain. The cause of this pain is still unknown, but it may be due to dysfunction of key nuclei in the processing of nociceptive information.In order to determine the possible causes of this prodromal symptom, we use different parkinsonian models, such as the hα- syn1-120 model, which presents a differential expressio