Oct 01 2020

A graduate student Nae Saito and Professor Toshikuni Sasaoka of the Department of Comparative and Experimental Medicine of the Brain Research Institute at Niigata University, in collaboration with Professor Kazuki Tainaka of the Department of System Pathology for Neurological Disorders of Brain Research Institute at Niigata University, Professor Shun Yamaguchi of the Graduate School of Medicine at Gifu University, and Professor Takatoshi Hikida and Assistant Professor Tom Macpherson of the Institute for Protein Research at Osaka University discovered that dopaminergic neurotransmission affects aversive memory formation and Arc expression in the cerebral cortex.

Dopaminergic neurotransmission, in addition to reward-based learning, is also believed to play a crucial role in aversive learning. Using dopamine D1 receptor (D1R) knockdown (KD) mice (in which D1R expression can be reversibly regulated), a behavioral test was conducted to evaluate the role of dopaminergic neurotransmission through D1Rs in aversive memory formation. In addition, we used mice crossbred from Arc-dVenus transgenic (in which the expression of activity-regulated cytoskeleton protein [Arc] can be visualized with the fluorescent protein, dVenus) and D1RKD mice. In these crossbred mice, whole-brain imaging was conducted after application of electric foot shock as an aversive stimulus to investigate the distribution of dVenus-controlled Arc expression in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex during aversive memory formation. Under the conditions of lowered D1R expression, aversive memory formation was impaired in Arc-dVenus × D1RKD mice as compared with that in the control mice; this impairment was associated with a decrease in dVenus expression in the cerebral cortex (visual, somatosensory, and motor cortices). These results indicate that D1R-mediated dopaminergic transmission is critical for aversive memory formation, which is specifically mediated by influencing Arc expression in the cerebral cortex.

These research results were published in the July 2020 special issue of Neuroscience Research, the official journal of the Japan Neuroscience Society, which focused on the new academic field of oscillology.

Publication Details

Title: Neurotransmission through dopamine D1 receptors is required for aversive memory formation and Arc activation in the cerebral cortex
Journal: Neuroscience Research
Authors: Nae Saito,Kazuki Tainaka, Tom Macpherson, Takatoshi Hikida, Shun Yamaguchi, Toshikuni Sasaoka
DOI: 10.1016/j.neures.2020.04.006