Biology subjects

Aboharb, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Aboharb, F..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Classification of psychedelic drugs based on brain-wide imaging of cellular c-Fos expression

Psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA are psychoactive compounds that exert behavioral effects with distinguishable but also overlapping features. The growing interest in using these compounds as therapeutics necessitates preclinical assays that can accurately screen psychedelics and related analogs. We posit that a promising approach may be to measure drug action on markers of neural plasticity in native brain tissues. We therefore developed a pipeline for drug classification using light sheet fluorescence microscopy of immediate early gene expression at cellular resolution followed by machine learning. We tested male and female mice with a panel of drugs, including psilocybin, ketamine, 5-MeO-DMT, 6-fluoro-DET, MDMA, acute fluoxetine, chronic fluoxetine, and vehicle. In one-versus-rest classification, the exact drug was identified with 67% accuracy, significantly above the chance level of 12.5%. In one-versus-one classifications, psilocybin was discriminated from 5-MeO-DMT, ketamine, MDMA, or acute fluoxetine with >95% accuracy. We used Shapley additive explanation to pinpoint the brain regions driving the machine learning predictions. Our results support a novel approach for characterizing and validating psychoactive drugs with psychedelic properties.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Mixed Multi-Level Visual, Reward, and Motor Signals in Dorsomedial Frontal Cortex Area F7 during Active Naturalistic Video Exploration

In the primate brain the frontal lobes support complex functions, including social cognition. Understanding the functional organization of these regions requires an approach for rich functional characterization. Here we used a novel paradigm, the visual exploration of dynamic social and non-social video scenes, to characterize diverse functions in area F7 of dorsomedial premotor cortex in the macaque monkey (Macaca mulatta) previously suggested to be involved in the representation of social interactions. We found that neural populations within this area carry information about both visual events in the videos, like head turning, and higher-level social categories, like grooming. In addition to signaling visual events, the population also encoded the delivery of juice reward. Our novel free viewing paradigm and naturalistic stimuli elicited active visual exploration, and we found that a large fraction of F7 neurons responded to the subjects own saccadic eye movements. Information from these three different domains were not separated across distinct neural sub-populations, but distributed, such that many neurons carried sensory, reward, and motor information in a mixed format. Thus we uncover a hitherto unappreciated diversity of functions in region F7 within dorsomedial frontal cortex.

neuroscience↗