The striatum is critical for decision-making, movement, and reward processing, functions achieved through subregional cellular and molecular specialization. Striatal cell types and subregions are differentially implicated in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, but the mechanisms underlying these vulnerabilities are poorly understood. Using single-nucleus RNA sequencing across 109 human and 22 mouse samples spanning dorsal and ventral striatum, we provide a comprehensive atlas of subregional neuronal specialization. We define rare neuronal subpopulations and transcriptional gradients along the dorsolateral-ventromedial axis with notable differences between species, suggesting divergent pharmacological targets, connectivity, and disease mechanisms. Integration with genome-wide association and pharmacological studies identifies human-enriched sites of opioid receptor expression and ventral-biased chronic antipsychotic action. Lastly, paired single-cell transcriptomic and somatic trinucleotide repeat expansion measurements identify differences in subregion and neuronal subtype vulnerability in Huntington's disease. Our findings lay the foundation for understanding how striatal cell types and subregions contribute to brain function and neurological disorders.
Raleigh M. Linville, Benjamin T. James, K. Galani et al.· Cell· 0 citations
Everyday decisions depend on associations between sensory stimuli, actions, and outcomes. The striatum supports these sensorimotor associations through dopamine-dependent plasticity. Recent work has characterized a local striatal microcircuit in which cholinergic interneurons (CINs) modulate dopamine release via activation of nicotinic receptors on dopamine axons. Here, we show that visual stimuli evoke dopamine in the dorsomedial striatum partly through this cholinergic mechanism. Using anatomical and functional methods to identify the pathways involved, we found that visual and auditory cortices lack connectivity with CINs and were unable to drive cholinergic-dependent dopamine release. Frontal regions, which were activated by visual stimuli, strongly recruited CINs, producing robust dopamine release both ex vivo and in vivo. These findings reveal a fundamental distinction between sensory and frontal corticostriatal inputs, demonstrating that only the latter can evoke cholinergic-dependent dopamine signals. This work establishes a framework for understanding how cortical circuits shape striatal dopamine to support reinforcement learning. Neural mechanisms underlying sensory-guided learning are not fully understood. Here authors show that salient visual stimuli elicit striatal dopamine partly through a local cholinergic mechanism and identify cortical areas driving cholinergic-dependent dopamine release in vivo and in vitro in the dorsomedial striatum.
Hannah C. Goldbach, Rachele Rimondini, Evan S. Swanson et al.· Nature Communications· 0 citations
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