Venue: Centre Broca
Marina Picciotto
Charles B. G. Murphy Professor of Psychiatry and Professor in the Child Study Center, of Neuroscience and of Pharmacology
Yale School of medicine
https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/marina-picciotto/
Invited by Jean-Christophe Delpech (NutriNeuro)
Title
Beyond dopamine: a VTA GABA pathway that encodes unconditioned reward value
Abstract
Activity of the mesolimbic system is essential for calculation of reward value and efficient execution of reward-related behaviors. Within this system, dopaminergic (DA) neurons play a critical role in driving motivation to obtain rewards and in encoding predictions and error signals during reinforcement learning; however, activity of DA neurons shifts to a predictive cue when a reward is expected, and therefore the mechanism for calculation of subjective reward value requires additional information. We find that activity of a GABAergic circuit originating from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and projecting to the ventral pallidum (VP) scales with the unconditioned value of a reward, independent of effort or associative cue-reward learning. Stimulation of this VTA-to-VP GABA pathway biases choice of an operant response paired with stimulation of the pathway, even when the rewarded outcome is of lesser value. These findings identify this novel VTA-to-VP GABA pathway as a critical circuit for calculating value during reward-based decision-making.
Biography
Dr. Picciotto joined the Yale faculty in 1995, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Jean-Pierre Changeux in the Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Neurobiology at The Rockefeller University in New York City in 1992, where she worked in the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience under Paul Greengard. She received a B.S. degree in biological sciences from Stanford University, Stanford, California, in 1985.
Dr. Picciotto was Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Neuroscience until January 2023 and is a member of the ACNP Scientific Council. She is 2023-2024 President of the Society for Neuroscience. She served on the Scientific Council of the National Institute on Drug Abuse from 2010-2014, was Treasurer of the Society for Neuroscience from 2014-2015, and President of the Society for Research on Nicotine & Tobacco from 2018-2019. She has been a Handling Editor for the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Nicotine and Tobacco Research, the Journal of Neurochemistry and Neuroscience Letters. In 2000 she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering by President Clinton and in 2012 she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was Chair of the Neuroscience Section from 2018-2019. Dr. Picciotto has been awarded the Human Frontiers 10th Anniversary Award, the Jacob P. Waletzky Award for addiction research and the Bernice Grafstein Mentorship award from the Society for Neuroscience, the Marion Spencer Fay Award from Drexel University, the Langley Award from SRNT, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for Innovative Research and the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2024. She is currently the president of the Society for Neuroscience.
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