The Effect Of Acute Stress On Mice's Natural Reward Seeking And Its Mechanism

Acute stress impacts on reward-seeking behaviors.Stress facilitates retrieval of drug addiction memories and drug seeking behavior.However,the effect of acute stress on natural reward seeking remains unknown,and the neural circuits mechanisms remain to be explored.The study aims to provide understanding in neural substrate underlying stress modulation of natural reward seeking behaviors.Here we report the involvement of intermediolateral septum(LSI)projection to Nucleus accumbens(NAc)in stress induced suppression of sucrose seeking behavior.In present study,we investigate the potential involvement of different brain regions following stress in sucrose self-administration trained animals.We highlight the potential importance of LSI in this process,evidenced by chemogenetic manipulation of this region.We further manipulate the LSI-NAc to examine the potential behavioral changes.We firstly screened brain regions activated following acute stress and sucrose seeking task,and we identified LSI which shows abundant c-Fos positive neurons.Chemogenetic based LSI inactivation reinstated sucrose seeking behavior after stress.By combination of pathway-specific retro-labeling and chemogenetic manipulation,we further demonstrated that LSI-NAc rather than LSI-VTA pathway is important in the stress induced suppression of sucrose-seeking responses.In conclusion,stress activation of LSI-NAc pathway halt the sucrose seeking behavior in a mice model of sucrose self-administration.