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. 2023 May 31;17:1198077. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1198077

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Copyright © 2023 Rodríguez-Manzo and Canseco-Alba.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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Endocannabinoid system at the mesolimbic circuit. The dopaminergic neurons of the mesolimbic (MSL) system originate in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and project to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) (Ikemoto, 2007). Dopaminergic neurons’ activity is regulated by GABAergic and glutamatergic inputs at the VTA. NAcc neuronal population includes predominantly GABAergic median spiny projection neurons (MSN) (90–95%) and three different types of interneurons: cholinergic interneurons (CIN), GABAergic fast spiking interneurons (FSI) and GABAergic persistent low threshold spiking interneurons (LTSI). Within the MSL system, eCBs are released from dopamine neurons in the VTA and from MSN in the NAcc. CB1R are expressed on GABAergic (Szabo et al., 2002) and glutamatergic (Melis, 2004) axon terminals of the VTA and on afferent glutamatergic axon terminals (Robbe et al., 2001) and GABAergic FSI (Winters et al., 2012) of the NAcc. CB2R have been reported to be expressed on dopaminergic neurons at the VTA (Zhang et al., 2014, 2017) as well as on MSN-D1 neurons at the NAcc (Zhang et al., 2022). Created with BioRender.com.