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Cocaine increases dopaminergic connectivity in the nucleus accumbens.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Dos Santos, Marc 
Cahill, Emma N 
Bo, Gregory Dal 
Vanhoutte, Peter 
Caboche, Jocelyne 

Abstract

The development of addictive behavior is associated with functional and structural plasticity in the mesocorticolimbic pathway. Increased connectivity upon cocaine administration has been inferred from increases in dendritic spine density, but without observations of presynaptic elements. Recently, we established a method that enables analyses of both dendritic spines and glutamatergic boutons and presented evidence that cocaine induces changes in striatal connectivity. As the pharmacological and behavioral effects of cocaine directly implicate dopaminergic neurons and their afferents, a remaining question is whether dopaminergic striatal innervations also undergo structural plasticity. To address this issue, we generated transgenic mice in which the fluorophore tdTomato is expressed under the promoter of the dopamine transporter gene. In these mice, specific labeling of dopaminergic boutons was observed in the striatum. Of note, the accordance of our results for control mice with previous electron microscopy studies confirms that our method can be used to decipher the spatial organization of boutons in relation to dendritic elements. Following repeated cocaine administration that led to behavioral locomotor sensitization, an increased density of dopaminergic boutons was observed 1 day later in the nucleus accumbens shell specifically, and not in other striatal regions. Combined labeling of dopaminergic boutons and striatal dendrites showed that cocaine significantly increased the percentage of dendritic spines associated with a dopaminergic bouton. Our results show that chronic cocaine administration induces structural plasticity of dopaminergic boutons that could participate in dopamine-dependent neuronal adaptations in the striatum.

Description

Keywords

3D imaging, Cocaine, Dendritic spine, Dopamine, Striatum

Journal Title

Brain Structure and Function

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1863-2661
1863-2661

Volume Title

223

Publisher

Springer Nature
Sponsorship
This work was supported by Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC), Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM) and the Labex Bio-Psy cluster of excellence. M.D.S. was a recipient of a fellowship from French Ministry of Research and Labex Bio-Psy. E.N.C. was supported by the Ecole de Neuroscience de Paris (ENP) and FRM.