Lectures and seminars Seminar: Revisiting the functions of dopamine in the entorhinal cortex

Abstract

Mounting evidence shows that dopamine in the striatum is critically involved in reward-based reinforcement learning. However, it remains unclear how dopamine reward signals influence the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit, another brain network critical for learning and memory. Dopamine inputs in the entorhinal cortex were described in the seminal work by Hökfelt et al (Science 184:177, 1974), while their functional roles remained enigmatic. I will discuss our recent revisiting of this entorhinal dopamine, where we found that it critically controls the acquisition, but not the retrieval, of associative memory (Lee et al., Nature 2021). I will further share our recent finding of dysfunctional entorhinal dopamine in Alzheimer’s disease mouse models (Nakagawa et al., bioRxiv 2024), which further suggests the critical role of entorhinal dopamine in Alzheimer’s disease.

Hosts: Sten Grillner and Tomas Hökfelt