Cell type specific signatures of reward: past successes, current failures, and future payoffs
Neuroscience Institute , Neuroscience
Emily Sylwestrak, University of Oregon
April 3, 2025 @ 11:00 am to 12:00 pm
117 Henderson Building
University Park
Hosted by Janine Kwapis, this seminar is open to faculty, students, staff, and other researchers.
Abstract
The processing of appetitive and aversive stimuli is essential to guide motivated behavior and is represented in many structures across the mammalian brain. The habenular complex is comprised of a transcriptionally diverse group of cells in the dorsal thalamus that play a role in behaviors related to aversion, stress, anxiety, and reward learning, but little is known about how different cell types map onto these behavioral functions. We use fiber-based calcium imaging in transcriptionally defined populations to reveal the cell type-specific reward dynamics of habenular neurons. We find tyrosine hydroxylase-expressing neurons are selectively active during reward predictive cues. Tachykinin1-expressing (Tac1) neurons are anatomically and functionally divided into two populations, Tac1-MHb and Tac1-LHb. Tac1-MHb neurons store information about accumulated rewards. In contrast, the activity of Tac1-LHb neurons reflects negative reward prediction error and is modulated by reward probability, size, and the presence of predictive cues. These data suggest that habenula cell types encode multiple aspects of reward responses and could serve as a mechanism to modulate motivated behavior in different emotional states.
About the Speaker
Dr. Sylwestrak received her bachelor's degree in biology in 2006 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she worked with Dr. Lee Cox to examine the electrophysiological properties of subtypes of thalamic neurons. She completed her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego in 2011 in the lab of Dr. Anirvan Ghosh. As a graduate student, she studied the role of a class of cell surface molecules, leucine-rich repeat-containing proteins, in controlling synapse formation in the hippocampus. In work published with Dr. Ghosh, she identified that the LRR protein Elfn1 is critical for established target-cell specificity in the hippocampus, a phenomenon whereby neurons can tailor the properties of a presynaptic terminal to the cell type identity of the postsynaptic target neuron. She continued working on the molecular control of synapse function at F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel with Dr. Ghosh and Dr. Peter Scheiffele before joining the Deisseroth Lab at Stanford in 2014. As a postdoc, she developed protocols for labeling RNA in intact, transparent tissues, to merge molecular information with three-dimensional structural information. She started her lab at the University of Oregon in Spring 2019. Her more recent work focuses on understanding how heterogenous, molecularly-defined neuronal populations work together to drive behavior, finding that different habenular cell types encode predictive or resultant aspects of motivated behavior, suggesting that habenular dysfunction may contribute to altered reward processing in neuropsychiatric disorders.
Contact
Janine Kwapis
jlk855@psu.edu