Knockout crickets for the study of learning and memory: Dopamine receptor Dop1 mediates aversive but not appetitive reinforcement in crickets.

ABSTRACT: Elucidation of reinforcement mechanisms in associative learning is an important subject in neuroscience. In mammals, dopamine neurons are thought to play critical roles in mediating both appetitive and aversive reinforcement. Our pharmacological studies suggested that octopamine and dopamine neurons mediate reward and punishment, respectively, in crickets, but recent studies in fruit-flies concluded that dopamine neurons mediates both reward and punishment, via the type 1 dopamine receptor Dop1. To resolve the discrepancy between studies in different insect species, we produced Dop1 knockout crickets using the CRISPR/Cas9 system and found that they are defective in aversive learning with sodium chloride punishment but not appetitive learning with water or sucrose reward. The results sugges

SUBMITTER: Awata H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4629116 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature