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A vast literature implicates the ventral striatum in the processing of reward-related information and in mediating the impact of such information on behavior. It is characterized by heterogeneity at the local circuit, connectivity, and functional levels. A tool for dissecting this complex structure that has received relatively little attention until recently is the analysis of ventral striatal local field potential oscillations, which are more prominent in the gamma band compared to the dorsal striatum. Here we review recent results on gamma oscillations recorded from freely moving rats. Ventral striatal gamma separates into distinct frequency bands (gamma-50 and gamma-80) with distinct behavioral correlates, relationships to different inputs, and separate populations of phase-locked putative fast-spiking interneurons. Fast switching between gamma-50 and gamma-80 occurs spontaneously but is influenced by reward delivery as well as the application of dopaminergic drugs. These results provide novel insights into ventral striatal processing and highlight the importance of considering fast-timescale dynamics of ventral striatal activity.
Keywords: nucleus accumbens, local field potential, phase locking, fast-spiking interneuron, tetrode recording
Citation: van der Meer MAA, Kalenscher T, Lansink CS, Pennartz CMA, Berke JD and Redish AD (2010) Integrating early results on ventral striatal gamma oscillations in the rat. Front. Neurosci. 4:300. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2010.00300
Received: 23 February 2010;
Paper pending published: 06 April 2010;
Accepted: 28 April 2010;
Published online: 15 September 2010
Edited by:
Rui M. Costa, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, PortugalReviewed by:
Henry H. Yin, Duke University, USACopyright: © 2010 van der Meer, Kalenscher, Lansink, Pennartz, Berke and Redish. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence: Matthijs A. A. van der Meer is currently a postdoc in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He received his BSc from University College Utrecht, followed by a MSc in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in 2002. His doctoral thesis work, at the University of Edinburgh’s Neuroinformatics Doctoral Training Centre with Drs. Mark van Rossum, Emma Wood, and Paul Dudchenko, was on experimental and computational investigations of head direction cells in the rat. After receiving his PhD in 2007 he joined the Redish lab to study the neural basis of planning at the level of neural ensembles. mvdm@umn.edu
A. David Redish is currently an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He received his undergraduate degree in writing and computer science from Johns Hopkins in 1991 and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, where he was a student member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, under the supervision of Dr. David Touretzky. He was a postdoc with Drs. Bruce McNaughton and Carol Barnes at the University of Arizona from 1997 to 2000. He has been at the University of Minnesota since 2000, where his lab studies decision-making, particularly issues of covert cognition in rats and failures of decision-making systems in humans. edish@umn.edu
© 2007 - 2015 Frontiers Media S.A. All Rights Reserved