Dr. Rosemary Bagot: At the intersection of threat and reward in nucleus accumbens glutamatergic afferents.

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The nucleus accumbens integrates diverse inputs, balancing threat and reward to orchestrate motivated behaviour. Glutamatergic projections from the ventral hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex converge in the accumbens medial shell and are implicated in reward processing as well as adaptation to chronic stress. How these pathways integrate aversive or appetitive events to modulate behaviour is not fully understood and largely unstudied in females, despite known sex-differences in stress-related psychopathologies. I will present new data using pathway-specific in vivo fibre-photometry and chemogenetic silencing to uncover how these projections encode aversive experiences to shape behavioural responding to threat and integrate information about the outcome of actions to shape learning about reward.