Prominent glutamate input to the NAc comes from the ventral hippocampus (vHipp), basolateral amygdala, and prefrontal cortex (Friedman et al., 2002; Phillipson and Griffiths, 1985). Pathway-specific activation of these fibers has been demonstrated to elicit distinct physiological and behavioral responses (Goto and Grace, 2008; Sesack and Grace, 2010). For example, vHipp input is particularly capable of stably depolarizing NAc neurons, allowing prefrontal

cortex input to generate spike firing in these cells (O’Donnell and Grace, 1995). Basolateral amygdala input, unlike prefrontal cortex input, readily supports optogenetic self-stimulation (Stuber et al., 2011). To elucidate the mechanistic underpinnings of these types of pathway-specific effects, we examined the innervation patterns and synaptic properties of vHipp, basolateral amygdala, selleck inhibitor and prefrontal cortex input to the NAc. In addition, we assayed each pathway for cocaine-induced synaptic plasticity and subjected each one to optogenetic manipulations in vivo. To examine the innervation patterns of excitatory input to the NAc, we targeted enhanced yellow fluorescent protein (EYFP) expression to projection neurons in the vHipp, basolateral amygdala, and prefrontal cortex (Figure 1A; additional images are shown in Figure S1 available

online). When EYFP expression was measured in the NAc in images captured with identical settings, the brightest fluorescent signal was observed in vHipp fibers located in the medial NAc shell (Figure 1B). In the NAc core and lateral shell, the fluorescence VX770 coming from vHipp axons was relatively modest. In contrast, EYFP expression in the amygdala and prefrontal

cortex input, while not as pronounced in the Rolziracetam medial shell, was more apparent throughout other subregions of the ventral striatum. The innervation patterns of these two pathways were considerably uneven, yet not as localized to any specific subregion as the vHipp fibers were to the medial shell (Figures 1 and S1). To substantiate the indication that vHipp fibers predominate in the medial NAc shell, we injected the retrograde tracer Fluoro-Gold into this region (Figure 2A). This approach enabled the identification of NAc shell-projecting neurons throughout the brain (Brog et al., 1993). We identified large populations of retrogradely labeled cells in several regions, including the hippocampus (ventral subiculum and entorhinal cortex), basolateral amygdala, and prefrontal cortex (Figure 2B). Using slices from each region that contained dense populations of NAc-projecting cells, we counted more medial NAc shell-projecting neurons in the vHipp than in either the basolateral amygdala or prefrontal cortex (Figure 2C). These manual cell counts highly correlated with the anti-Fluoro-Gold fluorescent signal in each slice (Figure S2; R2 = 0.86; p < 0.