Mouse Self-Administration Chambers

We are purchasing a set of 8 mouse selfadministration chambers from Med Assoc for the Behavioral Neuroscience Research
Branch; the system will also be shared as needed with other NIDA IRP Branches. It will be used to determine the neural mechanisms in the brain that mediate different animal behavioral models used in drug addiction research.

We want to determine the neural mechanisms in the brain that mediate drug craving and other animal behavior models of
drug addiction. The Hope lab examines how strongly activated Fos protein-expressing neurons in the brain are altered during learning to mediate specific drug-related memories. While we can describe many of these alterations in rat as well as mice, the
ability to regulate and test of the causal roles of these alterations selectively in the Fosexpressing neurons can only be done in transgenic mice. Thus we need to run all of our studies for these experiments in mouse-specific self-administration chambers. Rat chambers are much too big and not appropriate for the much lower strength and size of mice. We do not have any mouse self-administration chambers in our lab. We are currently borrowing self-administration chambers from the Vendruscolo and Koob labs, who will soon want their mouse chambers back. Without these chambers, we cannot continue our ongoing experiments with mice, which is the predominant species for transgenic animal work.