Cocaine increases calreticulin expression in ventral hippocampus projection neurons
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Brooklynn Murray, 3rd year |
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Hayley Kuhn, 3rd year |
Abstract:
The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a region important for reward and motivation and is dysregulated by drugs of abuse, such as cocaine. Ventral hippocampus neurons, which are important for stress and memory1, synapse onto NAc medium spiny neurons (vHPC-NAc; Fig. 1). vHPC-NAc neurons are critical to cocaine seeking behavior: their activation drives cocaine seeking and their inhibition reduces cocaine seeking2-5. However, how drugs, like cocaine, shape the function of these critical circuit neurons is not well understood. We aim to determine how cocaine alters gene expression in vHPC-NAc neurons. Preliminary sequencing data from mouse vHPC-NAc neurons indicated that cocaine increases Calr1 expression, which encodes for the ER chaperone protein, calreticulin, as a target for cocaine. We sought to validate that cocaine increases calreticulin expression in vHPC-NAc neurons.
