Cecilia Barajas, George Wilcox, and Carolyn Fairbanks

Cece is investigating agmatine, a mild NMDAR antagonist, that has been shown to mitigate the rewarding properties of opioids while still providing pain relief.  Her preliminary data demonstrated that agmatine pretreatment inhibited acquisition of oxycodone self-administration compared to saline pretreated animals.  In addition, the agmatine pretreatment group exhibits less cFos expression in the nucleus accumbens than controls.  

Cece’s pilot will expand upon these results with two aims: Aim 1: determine the impact of agmatine on oxycodone-induced conditioned place preference (CPP) and Aim 2: determine specific neuronal types and circuits involved in the agmatine mediated inhibition of opioid induced reward behavior.

For this project she will partner with the Structural Circuits Core. The group will use CPP experiments with FosTRAP2 transgenic mouse line to fluorescently label activated neurons. The labeled brains will then undergo tissue clearing to create a 3D rendering of the mouse brain and visualize the impact that agmatine has on opioid induced activation of neural circuits throughout the brain’s reward system. They hypothesize that agmatine pre-treatment will reduce the expression of tdTomato in NAc, dopaminergic VTA neurons, and glutamatergic neurons in the PFC, BLA, and hippocampus.