Figure 3.

The effect of CART on spontaneous excitatory synaptic transmission in saline-treated animals. Traces show 3 s of continuous recording from an aPVT neuron prior to (A, upper), and then during bath application of 10 nmol CART (A, middle), with corresponding amplitude histograms (including baseline noise distributions) below and arrows indicating the mean (saline pre-CART, mean amplitude = −22 pA, A, lower left; saline post-CART, mean amplitude = −17 pA, A, lower right). Cumulative probability distributions (from representative recordings) showed a significant reduction in both instantaneous frequency (B, upper) and amplitude (B, lower) of aPVT neurons in response to saline or cocaine. Group data plots (C) show sEPSC instantaneous frequency was reduced by CART (* p = 0.002), as was amplitude (* p = 0.008). In contrast, rise time was not affected by CART. Finally, decay time constant was significantly increased following CART (* p = 0.007, an average of 1387 events and 799 events were analyzed respectively) with representative traces of rise and decay time pre- and post-CART.