Department of Neurobiology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 364 Plantation Street, Worcester, MA 01605, USA.
Trends Neurosci. 2010 Oct;33(10):457-64. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2010.07.001. Epub 2010 Aug 10.
A goal of memory research is to understand how changing the weight of specific synapses in neural circuits in the brain leads to an appropriate learned behavioral response. Finding the relevant synapses should allow investigators to probe the underlying physiological and molecular operations that encode memories and permit their retrieval. In this review I discuss recent work in Drosophila that implicates specific subsets of dopaminergic (DA) neurons in aversive reinforcement and appetitive motivation. The zonal architecture of these DA neurons is likely to reveal the functional organization of aversive and appetitive memory in the mushroom bodies. Combinations of fly DA neurons might code negative and positive value, consistent with a motivational systems role as proposed in mammals.
记忆研究的目标之一是了解改变大脑神经回路中特定突触的权重如何导致适当的学习行为反应。找到相关的突触应该可以让研究人员探究编码记忆并允许其检索的潜在生理和分子操作。在这篇综述中，我讨论了最近在果蝇中发现的特定多巴胺能（DA）神经元亚群在厌恶强化和食欲动机中的作用。这些 DA 神经元的区域结构可能揭示了蘑菇体中厌恶和食欲记忆的功能组织。果蝇 DA 神经元的组合可能编码负性和正性价值，与哺乳动物中提出的动机系统作用一致。
