Neuroimaging Research Branch, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Intramural Research Program, NIH, Baltimore, MD, 21224, USA.
Behavioral Neuroscience Research Branch, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Intramural Research Program, NIH, Baltimore, MD, 21224, USA.
Commun Biol. 2021 Jan 14;4(1):66. doi: 10.1038/s42003-020-01612-x.
Intracranial self-stimulation, in which an animal performs an operant response to receive regional brain electrical stimulation, is a widely used procedure to study motivated behavior. While local neuronal activity has long been measured immediately before or after the operant, imaging the whole brain in real-time remains a challenge. Herein we report a method that permits functional MRI (fMRI) of brain dynamics while mice are cued to perform an operant task: licking a spout to receive optogenetic stimulation to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) during a cue ON, but not cue OFF. Licking during cue ON results in activation of a widely distributed network consistent with underlying MPFC projections, while licking during cue OFF (without optogenetic stimulation) leads to negative fMRI signal in brain regions involved in acute extinction. Noninvasive whole brain readout combined with circuit-specific neuromodulation opens an avenue for investigating adaptive behavior in both healthy and disease models.
颅内自我刺激，即动物为接受区域脑电刺激而进行操作性反应，是一种广泛用于研究动机行为的方法。虽然局部神经元活动在操作性反应之前或之后立即进行了测量，但实时成像整个大脑仍然是一个挑战。在此，我们报告了一种方法，该方法允许在小鼠被提示执行操作性任务时进行功能磁共振成像（fMRI）：在提示开启时舔一个喷嘴以接收光遗传刺激到内侧前额叶皮层（MPFC），但在提示关闭时不进行刺激。在提示开启时舔舐会导致广泛分布的网络激活，这与潜在的 MPFC 投射一致，而在提示关闭时舔舐（没有光遗传刺激）会导致涉及急性消退的大脑区域的 fMRI 信号为负。非侵入性的全脑读出与特定于电路的神经调节相结合，为研究健康和疾病模型中的适应性行为开辟了一条途径。
