Come visit our posters this afternoon, board OO7 to OO9. #SFN23

After struggling with FedEx to get our posters done we managed to get them early enough to present them.

Poster session done at @EurBehavPharm . As usual, plenty of nice feedback and great discussions.

Don't miss our PI's poster today at #RSA2023 on sex differences in alcohol choice.

This points to the possibility that specific interactions between alcohol and social reward exist and that further research is needed to understand the neurobiological mechanisms involved.

.. especially when paired with a group housed partner rat and they choose social interaction at the expense of water or a very diluted alcohol solution. This proves that our social choice procedure is indeed well adapted to measure social choice/preference in rats and that..

This was an attempt to determine "the point of indifference" or when will the rats start to equally choose social reward and alcohol, or eventually switch their preference to social interaction when the requirements for alcohol become too high

🚨🚨PAPER ALERT🚨🚨 We're glad to share with you our laboratory's first paper published in @npp_journal about alcohol and social choice in Wistar rats (full text: nature.com/articles/s41386-0…). We also have a🧵for you!

In the past weeks we've been experimenting with 3D printing to make skulls serving as training models for intracerebral surgeries. It's a process of trial and error but we're enjoying it to the fullest! #3Dprinter #neuroscience #research #3Rs

Later, we ran a gene expression analysis and found that one particular gene coding for GAT-3 (a GABA transporter) was expressed less in these addicted rats in a brain region called the central amygdala, a hub for processing emotion and reward related information.