Ellie Keane

Opioid addiction affects 16 million people worldwide every year. Researchers have long been interested in the neural mechanisms of addiction, providing insight into how the brain is affected by consistent drug use. The Nestler lab at Mount Sinai theorized that chronic drug self administration greatly damages neurons and receptors. In this study, researchers further explored the effects of long term cocaine use and aimed to identify how different gene expression affects one’s susceptibility to relapse. Focusing on transcriptional changes within the brain's reward circuitry, researchers identified addiction behaviors that are associated with a certain region. Opiates and addictive drugs such as cocaine reprogram the brain's reward circuitry, causing genetic adaptations. Genes are the code of all life, and transcription is the first step, essentially carrying the information to build a protein. Through RNA sequencing of rat nucleus accumbens. The Nucleus Accumbens is a religion of the brain located within the reward circuitry associated with motivation and action. It was discovered that a protein called CREB was identified as a key regulator of genes associated with cocaine addiction. This discovery provides new insight into the molecular basis of cocaine addiction, which will guide future studies and point.