The Laboratory on Behavioral Neuroscience investigates the behavioral actions of brain neurotransmitters, using rodent models of symptoms of neuropsychiatric diseases. Approaches include behavioral neuropharmacology and behavioral genetics

        Galanin is a neuropeptide that exerts inhibitory modulation on acetylcholine and glutamate pathways relevant to learning and memory. In the ventral hippocampus, we found that galanin induces delay-dependent working memory deficits on T-maze delayed alternation and operant delayed nonmatching to position, prevents selective quadrant search in the Morris water task, and inhibits acetylcholine release from the septohippocampal pathway. Galanin is overexpressed in the basal forebrain in Alzheimer�s disease, while other neurotransmitters are declining, suggesting a unique role for galanin in this disease. We are now evaluating galanin receptor antagonists in learning and memory paradigms, to test the hypothesis that blocking endogenous galanin may help alleviate the memory deficits characteristic of Alzheimer�s disease.

        Transgenic and knockout mice, with mutations in genes expressed in the brain, provide powerful new tools for understanding the genetic substrates of behavior. Using a wide variety of relevant behavioral paradigms, our laboratory developed a three-tiered strategy for behavioral phenotyping that is becoming widely used. Several fascinating new transgenics and knockouts are presently being phenotyped, including galanin overexpressing transgenic mice, a mouse model of Tay Sachs disease, and knockouts for neurotransmitters receptors and transporters. Behavioral genetics is further being pursued with quantitative trait loci linkage analyses of mouse behavioral traits relevant to schizophrenia and to anxiety.

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