SUMMARY Excitatory afferents to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are thought to facilitate reward seeking by encoding reward-associated cues. Selective activation of different glutamatergic inputs to the NAc can produce divergent physiological and behavioral responses, but mechanistic explanations for these pathway-specific effects are lacking. Here, we compared the innervation patterns and synaptic properties of ventral hippocampus, basolateral amygdala, and prefrontal cortex input to the NAc. Ventral hippocampal input was found to be uniquely localized to the medial NAc shell, where it was predominant and selectively potentiated following cocaine exposure. In vivo, bidirectional optogenetic manipulations of this pathway attenuated and enhanced cocaine-induced locomotion. Challenging the idea that any of these inputs encode motivationally-neutral information, activation of each discrete pathway reinforced instrumental behaviors. Finally, direct optical activation of medium spiny neurons proved to be capable of supporting self-stimulation, demonstrating that behavioral reinforcement is an explicit consequence of strong excitatory drive to the NAc.

Coincident signaling by dopamine and glutamate is thought to be crucial for a variety of motivated behaviors. Previous work has suggested that some midbrain dopamine neurons are themselves capable of glutamate corelease, but this phenomenon remains poorly understood. Here, we expressed the light-activated cation channel Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) in genetically defined midbrain dopamine neurons to stimulate exocytosis specifically from dopaminergic terminals in both the nucleus accumbens (NAc) shell and dorsal striatum of brain slices from adult mice. Optical activation resulted in robust glutamate-mediated EPSCs in all medium spiny neurons examined in the NAc shell. In contrast, optically evoked glutamatergic currents were nearly undetectable in the dorsal striatum. Further, we used a conditional knock-out mouse lacking vesicular glutamate transporter 2 (VGLUT2) specifically in dopamine neurons to determine whether VGLUT2 is required for the exocytotic release of glutamate from dopamine neurons. Our data show that conditional knock-out completely abolished all optically evoked glutamate release. These results provide definitive physiological evidence for VGLUT2-mediated glutamate release by mature dopamine neurons projecting to the NAc shell, but not to the dorsal striatum. Thus, the unique ability of NAc-projecting dopamine neurons to synchronously activate both dopamine and glutamate receptors may have crucial implications for the ability to respond to motivationally significant stimuli.

Mesoaccumbens fibers are thought to co-release dopamine and glutamate. However, the mechanism of co-release of dopamine and glutamate is unclear, and the co-release by mesoaccumbens fibers has not been documented. By electron microcopy we showed that some mesoaccumbens fibers have vesicular transporters for dopamine (VMAT2) in axon-segments continuous with axon-terminals that lack VMAT2, but contain vesicular glutamate transporters type 2 (VGluT2). In vivo overexpression of VMAT2 did not change segregation of the two vesicular types, suggesting highly regulated mechanisms for maintaining this segregation. The mesoaccumbens axon terminals containing VGluT2-vesicles make asymmetric synapses; commonly associated with excitatory signaling. By optogenetics, we showed release of dopamine and glutamate from mesoaccumbens fibers. These findings reveal a complex type of signaling by mesoaccumbens fibers in which dopamine and glutamate although can be released from the same axons; they are not normally released at the same site or from the same synaptic vesicles.