Dopamine neuron paper is published!

Our paper on the function of dopamine reward neurons is now published in iScience!

In this study, we investigated the behavioral role of reward-encoding dopamine neurons. These neurons have been well studied in the context of learning, but less is known about their role in innate behaviors - behaviors that don’t require learning. While we expected that artificial activation of the reward neurons would promote appetitive behaviors such as feeding, we instead found the opposite - neuronal activation drove aversive responses! Check out our earlier post on the study’s preprint for why we think this happens and more details on what we found.

Congrats to all authors, especially Fiorella Lozada-Perdomo and Yuzhen Chen, who led the study. Yuzhen is applying to PhD programs right now and any program would be lucky to have her!