Determinants and function of tonic dopamine

About This Grant

Project Abstract On a moment-by-moment basis, each animal must consider its environment, experience, and goals to choose future actions. The striatum, including its dorsal and ventral portions, is an evolutionarily old structure that helps animals choose their actions and update action plans based on experience. Within this structure, dopamine places a crucial function in these processes. Dopamine signals in two ways – with slowly changing “tonic” levels and rapidly changing “phasic” signals. It has been proposed that tonic dopamine has fundamentally different functions and represents different features of experience than phasic dopamine. We have developed methods to measure tonic and phasic levels of dopamine in real-time as mice behave in a variety of contexts. We will use this new technology to examine the mechanisms and function of tonic dopamine levels to understand how perturbations of dopamine contribute to the cause and treatment of human neuropsychiatric disease.