Dopamine receptor 1 neurons in the dorsal striatum regulate food anticipatory circadian activity rhythms in mice
- California Institute of Technology, United States
- University of Washington, United States
- Claremont-McKenna College, Pitzer College, Scripps College, United States
- Simon Fraser University, Canada
- California State Polytechnic University Pomona, United States
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Washington, United States
Abstract
Daily rhythms of food anticipatory activity (FAA) are regulated independently of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which mediates entrainment of rhythms to light, but the neural circuits that establish FAA remain elusive. Here we show that mice lacking the dopamine D1 receptor (D1R KO mice), manifest greatly reduced FAA, whereas mice lacking the dopamine D2 receptor have normal FAA. To determine where dopamine exerts its effect, we limited expression of dopamine signaling to the dorsal striatum of dopamine-deficient mice; these mice developed FAA. Within the dorsal striatum, the daily rhythm of clock gene per2 expression was markedly suppressed in D1R KO mice. Pharmacological activation of D1R at the same time daily was sufficient to establish anticipatory activity in wild-type mice. These results demonstrate that dopamine signaling to D1R in the dorsal striatum plays an important role in manifestation of FAA, possibly by synchronizing circadian oscillators that modulate motivational processes and behavioral output.
Article and author information
Author details
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocol 1567.
Copyright
© 2014, Gallardo et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 4,086
- views
-
- 389
- downloads
-
- 83
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Dopamine receptor 1 neurons in the dorsal striatum regulate food anticipatory circadian activity rhythms in mice
eLife 3:e03781.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03781
Further reading
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Neuroscience
As the world population ages, new molecular targets in aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are needed to combat the expected influx of new AD cases. Until now, the role of RNA structure in aging and neurodegeneration has largely remained unexplored. In this study, we examined human hippocampal postmortem tissue for the formation of RNA G-quadruplexes (rG4s) in aging and AD. We found that rG4 immunostaining strongly increased in the hippocampus with both age and with AD severity. We further found that neurons with the accumulation of phospho-tau immunostaining contained rG4s, rG4 structure can drive tau aggregation, and rG4 staining density depended on APOE genotype in the human tissue examined. Combined with previous studies showing the dependence of rG4 structure on stress and the extreme power of rG4s at oligomerizing proteins, we propose a model of neurodegeneration in which chronic rG4 formation is linked to proteostasis collapse. These morphological findings suggest that further investigation of RNA structure in neurodegeneration is a critical avenue for future treatments and diagnoses.
-
- Neuroscience
Although grid cells are one of the most well-studied functional classes of neurons in the mammalian brain, whether there is a single orientation and spacing value per grid module has not been carefully tested. We analyze a recent large-scale recording of medial entorhinal cortex to characterize the presence and degree of heterogeneity of grid properties within individual modules. We find evidence for small, but robust, variability and hypothesize that this property of the grid code could enhance the encoding of local spatial information. Performing analysis on synthetic populations of grid cells, where we have complete control over the amount heterogeneity in grid properties, we demonstrate that grid property variability of a similar magnitude to the analyzed data leads to significantly decreased decoding error. This holds even when restricted to activity from a single module. Our results highlight how the heterogeneity of the neural response properties may benefit coding and opens new directions for theoretical and experimental analysis of grid cells.
