• Martin O Job and Michael J Kuhar.
• The Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University, 954 Gatewood Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30329, USA; Psychobiology Section, Molecular Neuropsychiatry Research Branch, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Intramural Research Program, NIH, Baltimore, MD 21224, USA. Electronic address: femijob@gmail.com.
• Neuroscience. 2017 Apr 21; 348: 135142135-142.

AbstractIn this study, we reexamined the effect of Cocaine-and-Amphetamine-Regulated-Transcript (CART) peptide on psychostimulant (PS)-induced locomotor activity (LMA) in individual rats. The Methods utilized were as previously published. The PS-induced LMA was defined as the distance traveled after PS administration (intraperitoneal), and the CART peptide effect was defined as the change in the PS-induced activity after bilateral intra-NAc administration of CART peptide. The experiments included both male and female Sprague-Dawley rats, and varying the CART peptide dose and the PS dose. While the average effect of CART peptide was to inhibit PS-induced LMA, the effect of CART peptide on individual PS-treated animals was not always inhibitory and sometimes even produced an increase or no change in PS-induced LMA. Upon further analysis, we observed a linear correlation, reported for the first time, between the magnitude of PS-induced LMA and the CART peptide effect. Because CART peptide inhibits PS-induced LMA when it is large, and increases PS-induced LMA when it is small, the peptide can be considered a homeostatic regulator of dopamine-induced LMA, which supports our earlier homeostatic hypothesis.Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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