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Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Dissociable effects of dopamine on neuronal firing rate and synchrony in the dorsal striatum

John M. Burkhardt^1,2, Xin Jin¹ and Rui M. Costa^1,2*

Section on In Vivo Neural Function, Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal

Previous studies showed that dopamine depletion leads to both changes in firing rate and in neuronal synchrony in the basal ganglia. Since dopamine D1 and D2 receptors are preferentially expressed in striatonigral and striatopallidal medium spiny neurons, respectively, we investigated the relative contribution of lack of D1 and/or D2-type receptor activation to the changes in striatal firing rate and synchrony observed after dopamine depletion. Similar to what was observed after dopamine depletion, co-administration of D1 and D2 antagonists to mice chronically implanted with multielectrode arrays in the striatum caused significant changes in firing rate, power of the local field potential (LFP) oscillations, and synchrony measured by the entrainment of neurons to striatal local field potentials. However, although blockade of either D1 or D2 type receptors produced similarly severe akinesia, the effects on neural activity differed. Blockade of D2 receptors affected the firing rate of medium spiny neurons and the power of the LFP oscillations substantially, but it did not affect synchrony to the same extent. In contrast, D1 blockade affected synchrony dramatically, but had less substantial effects on firing rate and LFP power. Furthermore, there was no consistent relation between neurons changing firing rate and changing LFP entrainment after dopamine blockade. Our results suggest that the changes in rate and entrainment to the LFP observed in medium spiny neurons after dopamine depletion are somewhat dissociable, and that lack of D1- or D2-type receptor activation can exert independent yet interactive pathological effects during the progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Keywords:

oscillations, Parkinson’s disease, local field potentials, entrainment, movement, caudate, putamen

Citation:

Burkhardt JM, Jin X and Costa RM (2009). Dissociable effects of dopamine on neuronal firing rate and synchrony in the dorsal striatum. Front. Integr. Neurosci. 3:28. doi: 10.3389/neuro.07.028.2009

Received:

16 March 2009;

Paper pending published:

13 April 2009;

Accepted:

09 October 2009;

Published online:

30 October 2009.

Edited by:

Geoffrey Schoenbaum, University of Maryland School of Medicine, USA

Reviewed by:

Yuji Takahashi, University of Maryland, USA
John P. O'Doherty, California Institute of Technology, USA

© 2009 Burkhardt, Jin and Costa. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Rui M. Costa, Champalimaud Neuroscience Program, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Rua da Quinta Grande, 6, 2780-156 Oeiras, Portugal. e-mail: ruicosta@fchampalimaud.org