Optogenetic Activation of the Excitatory Neurons Expressing CaMKIIα in the Ventral Tegmental Area Upregulates the Locomotor Activity of Free Behaving Rats
Figure 5
Immunochemistry results from the VTA region of brain slices from the optogenetic rats. All the subfigures were photographed under confocal microscopy and processed using the FV1000 software (Olympus Inc., Japan). The red channels represent CaMKIIα-mCherry expressions and the green channels represent TH expressions, whereas the right column (Figures 5(c), 5(f), and 5(i)) indicates the merged two channels. ((a)–(c)) A typical view of the CaMKIIα-mCherry and TH-GFP expressions under 10x microscopy. ((d)–(f)) A selected VTA region observed under 40x microscopy where the CaMKIIα and TH expressions overlapped. ((g)–(i)) A region of interest (ROI) from the rectangular window shown in ((d)–(f)). The white arrows in (i) point out the several neuronal cell bodies merged with red and green channels, indicating that these neurons coexpress CaMKIIα and TH.
