Systematic Input–Output Mapping Reveals Structural Plasticity of VTA Dopamine Neurons-Zona Incerta Loop Underlying the Social Buffering Effects in Learned Helplessness

A common phenomenon called social buffering (SB), communication within conspecific animals is a benefit for a stressed individual to better recover from aversive events, is crucial to all mammals. Although the dopamine reward system has been implicated in SB, it is not clear which neuronal populatio...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Molecular neurobiology 2022-02, Vol.59 (2), p.856-871
Main Authors: Cai, Hongwei, Zhang, Pei, Qi, Guangjian, Zhang, Lijun, Li, Tongxia, Li, Ming, Lv, Xinyuan, Lei, Jie, Ming, Jie, Tian, Bo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal models
Animals
Anterograde transport
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Cell Biology
Dopamine
Dopaminergic Neurons - physiology
Gene mapping
Helplessness, Learned
Humans
Learned helplessness
Luteinizing hormone
Mammals
Mice
Neural networks
Neurobiology
Neurology
Neurons
Neuroplasticity
Neurosciences
Reinforcement
Retrograde transport
Reward
Ventral Tegmental Area - physiology
Ventral tegmentum
Zona Incerta
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A common phenomenon called social buffering (SB), communication within conspecific animals is a benefit for a stressed individual to better recover from aversive events, is crucial to all mammals. Although the dopamine reward system has been implicated in SB, it is not clear which neuronal populations are relevant and how they contribute. Here, we adopted a learned helplessness (LH) animal model of depression and found that LH subjects housed with a conspecific partner show better performance in the shuttle box test, showing that SB improves the stress-coping abilities to deal with stress. Bidirectional manipulation of ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons by chemogenetic tools can mimic or block the SB effect in LH mice. To screen for SB-induced structure plasticity of VTA dopamine neurons, we employed viral genetic tools for mapping input and output architecture and found LH- and SB-triggered circuit-level changes in neuronal ensembles. Zona incerta (ZI), an overlapping brain region, was significantly changed in both anterograde and retrograde tracing during LH and SB. These results reveal a neural loop with structural plasticity between VTA dopamine neurons and ZI underlies the SB effects in LH and lays a foundation for studying how VTA dopamine neurons regulate SB-related neural circuits.
ISSN:0893-7648
1559-1182
DOI:10.1007/s12035-021-02614-4