Master thesis: PDE10A involvement in salience attribution

When explaining the causal mechanism behind dopamine’s role in reward, Berridge and Robinson (1998) suggest that dopamine mediates the attribution of incentive salience to rewards. Accordingly to Horvitz (2002) dopaminergic processes at the level of the medium spiny neurons (MSNs) are involved in the modulation of glutamate inputs to the striatum. MSNs combine the dopaminergic output from a salient event and the glutaminergic input from the cortex. The effect that dopamine has on the MSNs is mediated by cyclic nucleotide second messengers. These second messengers are in their turn regulated by the rate of degradation by phosphodiesterases (PDE). PDE10A mediates both cyclic nucleotides and is highly expressed in the striatum. In our study we primarily investigated the role of PDE10A in salience attribution. As a second research aim, we also investigated the role of PDE10A on habit formation. Berridge and Robinson explain drug craving by changes in attribution of incentive salience. However there is an alternative hypothesis that explains drug craving as an aberrant habit-like learning.status: publishe