#dreadd

Control Of A Timekeeping Circuit In The Brain Alters Mood

By combining super-fine electrodes and tiny amounts of a very specific drug, Duke University researchers have singled out a circuit in mouse brains and taken control of it to dial an animal’s mood up and down.

Stress-susceptible animals that behaved as if they were depressed or anxious were restored to relatively normal behavior by tweaking the system, according to a study appearing in the July…

HKUST Scientists Discover New Measures to Facilitate Neural Repair

Damage to axons in the central nervous system (CNS) typically results in permanent functional deficits. If injured neurons can regenerate sufficient number of axons, the CNS may recover and overcome such functional deficits.

A research team led by Prof Kai Liu, Assistant Professor from the Division of Life Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has recently…

Chemogenetic Technique Turns Mouse Behavior On and Off

Full article at http://neurosciencenews.com/chemogenetics-neurobehavior-dreadd-2020/.

Neuroscientists have perfected a chemical-genetic remote control for brain circuitry and behavior.  This evolving technology can now sequentially switch the same neurons – and the behaviors they mediate – on-and-off in mice, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health. Such bidirectional control is pivotal for decoding the brain workings of complex behaviors. The findings are the first to be published from the first wave of NIH grants awarded last fall under the BRAIN Initiative.

The research is in Neuron. (full access paywall)

Research: "A new DREADD facilitates the multiplexed chemogenetic interrogation of behavior" by Eyal Vardy, J. Elliott Robinson, Chia Li, Reid H.J. Olsen, Jeffrey F. DiBerto, Patrick M. Giguere, Flori M. Sassano, Xi-Ping Huang, Hu Zhu, Daniel J. Urban, Kate L. White, Joseph E. Rittiner, Nicole A. Crowley, Kristen E. Pleil, Christopher M. Mazzone, Philip D. Mosier, Juan Song, Thomas L. Kash, C.J. Malanga, Michael J. Krashes, and Bryan L. Roth in Neuron doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2015.03.065

Chemogenetics have dramatically transformed how  biologists deconstruct the involvement of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in a myriad of physiological and translational settings

Here we highlight a specific chemogenetic application that extends the utility of the concept ofRASSLs (receptors activated solely by synthetic ligands)

Interesting TECNHIQUE:  designer receptor exclusively activated by designer drug (DREADD) technology