Ph.D. Graduate Student Maite Azcorra's Research in the Dombeck Lab into Dopamine and Movement is Published in Nature Neuroscience
August 3, 2023
In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, a longstanding assumption that dopamine neurons respond only to rewards and reward predicting cues was challenged. Specifically, researchers identified one genetic subtype of dopamine neurons that does not respond to rewards and only fires only when the body moves. “When people think about dopamine, they likely think about reward signals,” said Professor Dan Dombeck “But when the dopamine neurons die, people have trouble with movement. That’s what happens with Parkinson’s disease, and it’s been a confusing problem for the field. We found a subtype that are motor signaling without any reward response, and they sit right where dopamine neurons first die in Parkinson’s disease. That’s just another hint and clue that seems to suggest that there’s some genetic subtype that’s more susceptible to degradation over time as people age.”
The study was co-led by the Department of Neurobiology's Professor Dan Dombeck and Feinberg School of Medicine's John Eccles Professor of Neurology Raj Awatramani. The paper’s first authors are Maite Azcorra and Zachary Gaertner, both graduate students in Dombeck's and Raj Awatramani’s laboratories.