George Olivier, Hope Bruce T
Department of Neuroscience, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program, National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, MD 21224, USA.
Neuropharmacology. 2017 Aug 1;122:107-114. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropharm.2017.04.031. Epub 2017 Apr 20.
Alcohol induces many alterations in the brain that are thought to contribute to alcohol addiction. Most of the known alterations are induced in all neurons of a brain area or all neurons of a given cell type, regardless of whether they were activated during behavior. While these alterations can have important modulatory effects on behavior, they cannot explain why animals respond specifically to alcohol-paired cues as opposed to all other non-paired cues and evoke highly specific goal-directed learned responses in models of drug craving. As an alternative, we hypothesize another class of alterations that are induced only within sparsely distributed patterns of neurons, called neuronal ensembles, that are selectively activated by alcohol-specific cues during behavior and encode the long-term memories underlying these learned behaviors in animal models of alcohol addiction. Here we review recent studies and techniques used to identify the role of neuronal ensembles in animal models of different phases of the alcohol addiction cycle. This article is part of the Special Issue entitled "Alcoholism".
酒精会在大脑中引发许多变化，这些变化被认为与酒精成瘾有关。大多数已知的变化是在脑区的所有神经元或特定细胞类型的所有神经元中诱发的，无论它们在行为过程中是否被激活。虽然这些变化可能对行为有重要的调节作用，但它们无法解释为什么动物会对与酒精配对的线索做出特异性反应，而不是对所有其他未配对的线索做出反应，以及在药物渴望模型中引发高度特异性的目标导向性学习反应。作为一种替代解释，我们假设另一类变化仅在稀疏分布的神经元模式（称为神经元集群）中诱发，这些神经元集群在行为过程中被酒精特异性线索选择性激活，并在酒精成瘾动物模型中编码这些学习行为背后的长期记忆。在这里，我们回顾了最近用于确定神经元集群在酒精成瘾周期不同阶段动物模型中作用的研究和技术。本文是名为“酒精中毒”的特刊的一部分。
