Back

Behavioral Decoding Reveals Cortical Endocannabinoid Potentiation during Δ9-THC Impairment

English, A.; Marcus, D.; Yadav, K.; Elkhouly, Y.; Levy, A.; Corbit, V.; Chun, G.; Ask, M.; Svedberg, A.; Poces-Bell, J.; Uittenbogaard, F.; Simons, R.; Witten, I.; Zweifel, L.; Land, B. B.; Stella, N.; Bruchas, M.

2025-09-28 neuroscience
10.1101/2025.09.26.678874 bioRxiv
Show abstract

How {Delta}9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) impairs natural behaviors in mice remains unknown. We developed a video-monitored behavioral platform with machine learning classifiers to unravel discrete changes in natural mouse behaviors. THC infusion into the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) disrupted walking kinematic features characteristic of impairment responses. THC predominantly increased mPFC GABAergic activity preceding walk initiation shifting the mPFC excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance. Pose-defined closed loop photo-stimulation of mPFC GABAergic neurons demonstrated that THC exacerbates selected parameters of motor impairment. Surprisingly, THC also induced a time locked, movement-induced, transient potentiation of mPFC endocannabinoid (eCB) release and ensuing CB1R-mediated synaptic inhibition. Here we establish that THC-modifies mPFC E/I balance to excitation via dynamic changes in eCB release which acts to induce behavioral impairment.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.