2020 Seed Grant
Emily L. Sylwestrak, Ph.D.
University of Oregon
Women’s Council Seed Grant
Survival often hinges on learning how to avoid threats and how to obtain “rewards”, such as food, water, and mating opportunity. The brain has evolved to quickly learn what actions lead to a reward, increasing the motivational drive to perform those actions and generating a perceived pleasure when obtaining the reward. The neural pathways that drive reward learning can be hijacked by drugs of abuse, often by acting on very specific cells. For example, morphine acts directly on only about 2% of neurons in the brain, but it has a devastatingly powerful effect on behavior in addiction. Our research looks at function of different types of neurons as animals seek out rewards in the environment and how that changes in addiction. We look at both neurons that are directly or indirectly modulated by opiates and try to understand how their firing patterns change during chronic morphine, addiction, and withdrawal. This work will help us understand how different types of neurons control reward seeking, why some have an outsized role in addiction, and how we could better target treatments to the most relevant cell types.
