Kellendonk et al. have reported that transient and selective overexpression of dopamine D2 receptors in the mouse striatum during development has long-term effects on cognitive function mediated by the prefrontal cortex. This is an important study providing further elegant evidence that disturbed function of the subcortical dopamine system may affect dopamine functioning in the entire circuitry and have important adverse behavioral consequences. It is unclear, however, whether this mouse model provides us with new clues about the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. A hyperdopaminergic hypothesis of schizophrenia originated from pharmacological studies showing that dopamine D2 antagonists have antipsychotic efficacy and dopamine agonists, such as amphetamine or apomorphine, can induce psychosis (Randrup and Munkvad, 1974; Snyder, 1972). This hypothesis has been supported recently by clinical data from brain imaging studies...  Read more

View all comments by Barbara K. Lipska

The development of animal models is a critical need in the realm of schizophrenia research. Current models relying on lesions or pharmacological manipulations may be relatively nonspecific, and thus, less than optimal for unraveling the underlying pathophysiology of the disorder. Models in which specific key candidate genes are up- or down-regulated may be better models because the effects can be more subtle and, as in this study, a very specific behavioral deficit may result. Ultimately, many genes, including DRD2, may be involved in discrete aspects of the illness, and when those gene deficiencies co-occur in certain individuals, schizophrenia may manifest. This study developed and validated a model, but the study itself is a model for how such studies should be done.

View all comments by Stephen J. Glatt

The study by Kellendonk and colleagues from Eric Kandel’s lab at Columbia is a landmark piece of science in a number of respects. Transgenic overexpression of D2 receptors in the mouse striatum is a novel model of how a developmental perturbation in striatal dopaminergic signaling has long-term implications for processing of information through critical brain circuits involved in learning and memory. The model may also have implications for understanding abnormalities of the function of this circuit in schizophrenia. There is ample evidence from clinical and from postmortem studies that cortical-striatal circuits are involved as part of the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. The work of Ann Marie Thierry and colleagues in Paris in the 1970s first drew attention to the fact that cortical function impacted on the striatal dopamine system (Thierry et al., 1973). A ground-breaking study of Pycock et al. (1980) showed that DA...  Read more

View all comments by Daniel Weinberger

I read the paper by Simpson et al. from Kandel's group with much interest. It seems that the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia has many lives and appears and reappears in many forms. This latest reincarnation combines hyperdopaminergia with the neurodevelopmental hypothesis of the disorder. My initial enthusiasm, however, waned upon closer reading of the paper.

It seems that the various conclusions reached are not wholly supported by the results. The prefrontal cognitive deficits of the D2 mice seem to be extremely subtle. It is difficult to infer specific impairments of working memory performance solely from acquisition effects. The D2 mice require more trials to reach criteria, but how do the mice perform once these criteria are met? To be sure, schizophrenia patients present with learning impairments, but their working memory deficits are persistent and ever present. It is interesting that high-order “executive functions” as measured by attentional set-shifting (e.g., intra- and extra-dimensional shifts) are spared in these mice, given that these depend on the rodent...  Read more

View all comments by Ricardo Ramirez

Comment by Tomiki Sumiyoshi and Philip Seeman
Kellendonk et al. report various behavioral and neurochemical findings from transgenic mice expressing an increased number of dopamine (DA)-D2 receptors in the striatum, labeled by 3H-spiperone. These mice showed deficits in some aspects of working memory, a cognitive domain associated with the prefrontal cortex function.

This study was prompted by the landmark hypothesis that DA supersensitivity in some of the subcortical brain regions, such as the striatum, constitutes a neurochemical basis for psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., van Rossum, 1966; Seeman et al., 2005). Conventionally, dysregulation of DA-related behaviors, including enhanced locomotor activity and stereotypy, as well as disrupted prepulse inhibition, have been thought to reflect psychosis-related symptoms. However, the D2 receptor transgenic mice did not demonstrate alterations in any...  Read more

View all comments by Tomiki Sumiyoshi
View all comments by Philip Seeman

I agree with Dr Weinberger's comments about the work of Kellendonk et al. In this sense, the cortical, frontal-striatal connections are well-known circuits involved in the development of schizophrenia.

Dr. Weinberger, in 1992, reported studies from limbic-prefrontal circuits, connections involved in schizophrenia pathophysiology (Weinberger et al., 1992). This work used an inverse experimental methodology (of corroborating the existing relationship between frontal cortex and the striatum) from the methodology commonly used (search for the line-activation in frontal cortex, then see the results in the striatum).

The most outstanding part of the study is one dedicated to the developmental approach. Thus, in the article, it was clear that restoring the normal DA function in the striatum did not restore cognitive functioning. As this article demonstrates, developmental approaches are excellent for the understanding of the neurobiology of schizophrenia.

References:

Weinberger DR, Berman KF, Suddath R, Torrey EF. Evidence of dysfunction of a prefrontal-limbic network in schizophrenia: a magnetic resonance imaging and regional cerebral blood flow study of discordant monozygotic twins. Am J Psychiatry. 1992 Jul;149(7):890-7. Abstract

View all comments by Patricia Estani

I think this is an interesting paper, as it shows that alterations in tonic dopaminergic stimulation can result in a pronounced and qualitative switch (LTD to LTP) in the behavior of prefrontal neurons. Although the concept of tonic versus phasic dopaminergic stimulation has been adopted widely by the schizophrenia research community, the majority of the preclinical work has focused on acute changes in dopamine concentration and on subcortical structures, especially the nucleus accumbens, and from my perspective as a clinical researcher, it is welcome to see some data that extend to prefrontal cortex and longer timescales, although it must be emphasized that this paper concerns results from rats, in slices in vitro, using tetanic stimulation, and that the pretreatment with dopamine lasted for 40 minutes only. With these caveats, it is exciting to see that pretreatment with dopamine after what the authors presume is a 4-hour period of neurotransmitter depletion during slice preparation produces LTP after a weak tetanic stimulus, compared to LTD that the same stimulus evoked...  Read more

View all comments by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg

Matsuda et al. demonstrate that priming D1 and D2 receptors may induce LTP; otherwise, LTD develops. To elaborate, a weak tetanic stimulation and dopamine stimulation produces LTD. However, if dopamine is perfused for 12 to 40 minutes at D1 and D2 receptors and a tetanic stimulus is provided, LTP, a form of cellular learning associated with memory, develops. This study has potentially important implications for understanding the cause of prefrontally based failures in information processing in schizophrenia. It gives additional weight to arguments that reduced dopaminergic tone at the cortical level is responsible for at least some of the cognitive problems associated with the disorder.

It also helps make sense out of some otherwise anomalous data in the literature. For instance, in manipulations of several tests of purported attentional control and vigilance problems, findings appeared more consistent with difficulties in constructing a representation than with attention per se in target detection (e.g.,   Read more

View all comments by Terry Goldberg

In his June 20 comment, Dr. Goldberg raised an important question concerning our paper: how our results, showing the necessity of D1+D2 receptor coactivation for prefrontal LTP induction and priming, fit into the scheme proposed by Seamans et al., 2001, that is, the differential roles played by D1 and D2 receptors for prefrontal cortex (PFC) cognitive processes.

I think I have to first point out that the dependency of PFC long-term potentiation (LTP) induction (let alone "priming" now) on DA receptor subtypes may vary among subpopulations of PFC synapses. In ventral hippocampus (HC)-PFC synapses, LTP induction requires D1 but not D2 receptors (Gurden et al., 2000). This in vivo study fits with the idea that HC-PFC projection and its D1 receptor-mediated modulation are critical in spatial information processing (working memory) and encoding of this information. However, recent in vivo results of Yukiori Goto at the...  Read more

View all comments by Satoru Otani

Drs. Goldberg and Otani raise some excellent points in their comments on the Matsuda et al. paper. As Dr. Otani alluded to in his latest comment, it is useful to define exactly what is being modulated under different experimental conditions and how this all relates to prefrontal cortex (PFC) function in general.

Dr Otani’s studies investigate synaptic plasticity induced by tetanic stimulation and how this process is modulated by tonic dopamine (DA). Long-term potentiation/long-term depression (LTP/LTD) induced by tetanic stimulation has provided us with perhaps the best model of the cellular basis of long-term memory and has been proposed to underlie, among other things, various aspects of long-term spatial memory and declarative memory. LTP is a long-lasting, passive, associational memory mechanism, unlike working memory that is transient in nature, relies on active processing and is not associational. Therefore, in PFC, it would be highly unlikely that LTP/LTD is the neural mechanism of working memory. However, to solve a working memory problem, one must manipulate...  Read more

View all comments by Jeremy Seamans

The publication by Iizuka and colleagues is an important advance toward unraveling the basic biology of psychosis in general, and schizophrenia in particular. This is because they have found that a pathway known to be genetically associated with schizophrenia can alter the surface expression of dopamine D2 receptors. D2 continues to be the main target for all antipsychotic drugs (including aripiprazole and even the new Lilly glutamate agonists that have a potent affinity for D2High receptors).

In fact, the authors of this excellent study may do well to go one step further by testing whether the downregulation of dysbindin actually increases the proportion of D2 receptors that are in the high-affinity state, namely D2High. This is because all schizophrenia animal models markedly increase the proportion of D2High receptors by 100 to 900 percent (Seeman et al., 2005; Seeman et al., 2006). This generalization holds for animal models based on brain lesions, sensitization by...  Read more

View all comments by Philip Seeman

The study by Iizuka and colleagues is indeed very interesting. It suggests that one of the most promising risk genes for schizophrenia, the dysbindin gene, may functionally interact with dopamine D2 receptors. The D2 receptor itself is an old candidate in the study of schizophrenia, mostly because until very recently all antipsychotic medication had been directed against D2 receptors. But in addition, PET imaging studies have shown that the density and occupancy of D2 receptors is increased in drug-free and drug-naïve patients with schizophrenia.

How could this increase arise? In a subpopulation of patients it may be due to a polymorphism in the D2 receptor gene, the C957T polymorphism. The C-allele increases mRNA stability and has been found to be associated with schizophrenia, though obviously not all patients carry the C-allele. Iizuka and colleagues found an independent way in which the genetic risk factor dysbindin may upregulate D2 receptor signaling. Because dysbindin is downregulated in the brains of patients with schizophrenia, they used siRNA technology to study...  Read more

View all comments by Christoph Kellendonk

McNab and colleagues provide groundbreaking evidence showing that cognitive training with working memory tasks over a five-week period impacts D1 dopamine receptor availability in prefrontal cortex. Links between prefrontal D1 receptor function and working memory are often thought to be one-directional, i.e., that better D1 function supports better working memory, but here the authors show that working memory practice reciprocally affects D1 receptors.

An influential body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that an optimal level of prefrontal D1 receptor stimulation is required for working memory function (e.g., Seemans and Yang, 2004). Because acute pharmacological targeting of prefrontal D1 receptors reliably alters working memory, causal directionality from D1 to working memory remains evident. Nevertheless, these findings cast several other studies in a new light. Namely, when a population exhibits impaired (or enhanced) working memory and PET studies indicate differences in dopaminergic function, it is no longer...  Read more

View all comments by Michael J. Frank

This is an important article that describes profound changes in the dopamine D1 receptor binding potential after working memory training in healthy male controls. The study rests on prior work that has demonstrated changes in brain volume with practice (e.g., Draganski and May, 2008), and dopamine can be released at the synapse in measurable amounts even during, dare I say, fairly trivial activities (e.g., playing a video game (Koepp et al., 1998). The present study demonstrated that binding potential of D1 receptors decreased in cortical regions (right ventrolateral frontal, right dorsolateral PFC, and posterior cortices) with training, and the magnitude of this decrease correlated with the improvement during training. Binding potential of D2 receptors in the striatum did not change. Unfortunately, D2 receptors in the cortex could not be measured with raclopride.

Two points come to mind. One is theoretical—how long would such a change remain, i.e., is it transient or is it...  Read more

View all comments by Terry Goldberg