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Updated: May 29, 2026

Comprehensive Profiling of Dopamine Regulation in Substantia Nigra and Ventral Tegmental Area
Published on: August 10, 2012
Dopaminergic modulation of striatal neurons, circuits, and assemblies
D J Surmeier1, L Carrillo-Reid, J Bargas
1Department of Physiology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL 60611, USA. j-surmeier@northwestern.edu
None:
In recent years, there has been a great deal of progress toward understanding the role of the striatum and dopamine in action selection. The advent of new animal models and the development of optical techniques for imaging and stimulating select neuronal populations have provided the means by which identified synapses, cells, and circuits can be reliably studied. This review attempts to summarize some of the key advances in this broad area, focusing on dopaminergic modulation of intrinsic excitability and synaptic plasticity in canonical microcircuits in the striatum as well as recent work suggesting that there are neuronal assemblies within the striatum devoted to particular types of computation and possibly action selection.
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