Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 275, Issue 1, 5 November 1999, Pages 69-72
Neuroscience Letters

Psychological stress selectively increases extracellular dopamine in the ‘shell’, but not in the ‘core’ of the rat nucleus accumbens: a novel dual-needle probe simultaneous microdialysis study

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3940(99)00747-8Get rights and content

Abstract

In order to compare psychological stress-induced dopamine (DA) release in two subterritories (e.g. shell and core) of the nucleus accumbens of the same animal, a novel dual-needle microdialysis probe has been developed. The two needles were placed in the ipsilateral shell and core subterritories of the nucleus accumbens under pentobarbital anesthesia and 24 h later the microdialysis was started. Basal DA output was not significantly different between the shell and the core. Psychological stress for 20 min significantly increased extracellular DA levels in the shell of the nucleus accumbens, however, the levels of dopamine remained almost unaltered in the core. This finding suggests that DA transmission in the shell of the nucleus accumbens was selectively activated during psychological stress, and that the shell plays an important role in emotional responses. The results further show that microdialysis using the novel dual-needle probe could be very useful to differentiate neurochemical changes occurring in neighboring areas in the brain.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (#11670108) to M. Tanaka from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan. We wish to thank Professor Gary B. Glavin of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Manitoba, Canada, for his kind reviewing of an earlier version of this manuscript and helpful discussions.

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