Promoter-Specific Effects of DREADD Modulation on Hippocampal Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Formation.

This study evaluates the efficacy of designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drug (DREADDs) as a means of bidirectionally modulating the hippocampus in not only a hippocampus-dependent task but also in hippocampal synaptic plasticity. This is the first study to evaluate the effects of DREADD-mediated inhibition and excitation in hippocampal long-term potentiation. More specifically, this study evaluates the effect of promoter-specific expression of DREADD viruses in a heterogenic cell population, which revealed surprising effects of different promoters. With chemogenetics becoming a more ubiquitous tool throughout studies investigating circuit-specific function, these data are of broad interest to the neuroscientific community because we have shown that promoter-specific effects can drastically alter synaptic function within a specific region, without parallel changes at the level of behavior.