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. 2014 Jul 19;15:89. doi: 10.1186/1471-2202-15-89

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© Renda and Nashmi; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Chronic nicotine increases expression of α4* nAChRs on GABAergic somata of the ventral tegmental area (VTA). A-C) Low magnification images showing α4YFP expression (green) in dopaminergic neurons (TH, magenta) in the VTA. D-F) Higher power images showing immunohistochemical labeling of α4YFP (green) (D) on GABAergic (GAD67, red) (E) and dopaminergic (TH, magenta) (F) neurons of the VTA. G) Merged image showing α4YFP expression on a TH positive and a GAD67 positive neurons. H) Chronic nicotine causes an upregulation (57 ± 10%) of α4YFP* nAChRs on GABAergic somata of the VTA (p = 0.005, two sample t-test) as compared to saline controls, but α4YFP expression in dopaminergic neurons are unaffected (−8 ± 8%) (p = 0.5, Wilcoxon rank sum test). All n values are the total number of neurons imaged and analyzed from 5 nicotine pump mice and 5 saline pump mice.