Fig. 1: Organization of midbrain dopamine input into the tubular striatum and nucleus accumbens.
From: Dopaminergic signaling to ventral striatum neurons initiates sniffing behavior
a Schematic of tracing paradigm. DATIRES -Cre mice were injected into their VTA with AAV.FLEX.hSyn.mGFP.synaptophysin.mRuby allowing for mGFP expression in DAT+ cell bodies and synaptophysin.mRuby+ puncta in the terminals of DAT+ cells. Approximately 3 weeks later, coronal sections throughout the ventral striatum were collected for later fluorescence imaging and quantification of synaptophysin.mRuby+ puncta. Some aspects created in BioRender. Wesson, D. (2024) https://BioRender.com/g16b141. b Example of synaptophysin.mRuby expression throughout the ventral striatum in one mouse, with key regions of interest outlined by dashed lines. c Quantification of synaptophysin+ puncta throughout the anterior-posterior spans of regions of interest (n = 6 mice). Data are mean ± SEM and smoothed for visualization purposes only. d Histograms representing data in (c) with regions of interest segregated into their most anterior and posterior aspects (anterior most half vs. posterior most half, with the anterior or posterior-most 200 µm used for quantification of these regions. Points = individual mice. *p < 0.05 (ANOVA with multiple comparison corrections; see Results for absolute p values). abbreviations: VTA (ventral tegmental area), NAcSh (nucleus accumbens shell), NAcC (nucleus accumbens core), mTuS (medial aspect of the tubular striatum), LatTuS (lateral aspect of the tubular striatum), PCX (piriform cortex). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
