A specific prelimbic-nucleus accumbens pathway controls resilience versus vulnerability to food addiction

Laura Domingo-Rodriguez, Inigo Ruiz de Azua, Eduardo Dominguez, Eric Senabre, Irene Serra, Sami Kummer, Mohit Navandar, Sarah Baddenhausen, Clementine Hofmann, Raul Andero, Susanne Gerber, Marta Navarrete, Mara Dierssen, Beat Lutz, Elena Martín-García and Rafael Maldonado ()
Additional contact information
Laura Domingo-Rodriguez: Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Inigo Ruiz de Azua: University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Eduardo Dominguez: The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology
Eric Senabre: Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Irene Serra: Instituto Cajal, CSIC
Sami Kummer: Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Mohit Navandar: Johannes Gutenberg University
Sarah Baddenhausen: University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Clementine Hofmann: University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Raul Andero: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Susanne Gerber: Johannes Gutenberg University
Marta Navarrete: Instituto Cajal, CSIC
Mara Dierssen: The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology
Beat Lutz: University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Elena Martín-García: Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Rafael Maldonado: Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-16

Abstract: Abstract Food addiction is linked to obesity and eating disorders and is characterized by a loss of behavioral control and compulsive food intake. Here, using a food addiction mouse model, we report that the lack of cannabinoid type-1 receptor in dorsal telencephalic glutamatergic neurons prevents the development of food addiction-like behavior, which is associated with enhanced synaptic excitatory transmission in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). In contrast, chemogenetic inhibition of neuronal activity in the mPFC-NAc pathway induces compulsive food seeking. Transcriptomic analysis and genetic manipulation identified that increased dopamine D2 receptor expression in the mPFC-NAc pathway promotes the addiction-like phenotype. Our study unravels a new neurobiological mechanism underlying resilience and vulnerability to the development of food addiction, which could pave the way towards novel and efficient interventions for this disorder.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14458-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-14458-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14458-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().