AUTHOR=Latagliata Emanuele Claudio , Puglisi-Allegra Stefano , Ventura Rossella , Cabib Simona TITLE=Norepinephrine in the Medial Pre-frontal Cortex Supports Accumbens Shell Responses to a Novel Palatable Food in Food-Restricted Mice Only JOURNAL=Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience VOLUME=12 YEAR=2018 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00007 DOI=10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00007 ISSN=1662-5153 ABSTRACT=
Previous findings from this laboratory demonstrate: (1) that different classes of addictive drugs require intact norepinephrine (NE) transmission in the medial pre Frontal Cortex (mpFC) to promote conditioned place preference and to increase dopamine (DA) tone in the nucleus accumbens shell (NAc Shell); (2) that only food-restricted mice require intact NE transmission in the mpFC to develop conditioned preference for a context associated with milk chocolate; and (3) that food-restricted mice show a significantly larger increase of mpFC NE outflow then free fed mice when experiencing the palatable food for the first time. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that only the high levels of frontal cortical NE elicited by the natural reward in food restricted mice stimulate mesoaccumbens DA transmission. To this aim we investigated the ability of a first experience with milk chocolate to increase DA outflow in the accumbens Shell and c-fos expression in striatal and limbic areas of food–restricted and