Christopher Kroenke
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Neuroscience
Heavy drinking and stress together tend to make behavior rigid: actions become habitual and compulsive rather than flexible. A central brain region in that shift is the striatum, which helps convert deliberate actions into automatic habits.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biophysics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
alcohol use disorder
chronic intermittent ethanol
stress
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Test whether chronic intermittent ethanol exposure combined with forced swim stress shifts the excitatory-to-inhibitory balance of input to medium spiny neurons in the mouse dorsolateral striatum, using ex vivo slice electrophysiology.
- Use chemogenetic tools and genetically modified mouse strains to separate how excitatory cortical input and inhibitory parvalbumin-expressing interneuron input to striatal medium spiny neurons change with alcohol and stress.
- Estimate the neural tricarboxylic acid cycle rate, a core brain energy pathway, with dynamic magnetic resonance spectroscopy tracking glucose metabolism and neurotransmitter synthesis in the same mice measured electrophysiologically.
- Determine in nonhuman primates after schedule-induced polydipsia and open-access drinking whether magnetic resonance spectroscopy glutamate-to-GABA ratios in the putamen match electrophysiological measures of excitatory-inhibitory balance.
More about the research
The problem for researchers and clinicians is measurement. The relevant changes have been tracked by recording electrical activity in brain slices, which cannot be done in a living person. This project asks whether a non-invasive brain scanning technique can stand in for those recordings, by validating the scan against direct electrical measurements in the same animals.
Why it matters
If magnetic resonance spectroscopy can be shown to track the circuit changes that accompany stress and heavy alcohol use, clinicians would gain a non-invasive way to gauge how severely the brain has been affected in people with alcohol use disorder. That could support staging of brain impairment and provide a measurable target for evaluating treatments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brian Mathur
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Neuroscience
Determine the circuit-specific synaptic mechanisms by which acute ethanol strengthens GABAergic (inhibitory) input to dorsolateral striatum fast-spiking interneurons (FSIs), using molecular tools and whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology.
Matthew Pitts
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Neuroscience
Determine how mercury affects selenium-dependent antioxidant balance in primary cortical cultures, neurons grown in a dish, by measuring the activity of selenoenzymes, the selenium-containing enzymes that protect cells from oxidative damage.
Jun Wang
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Neuroscience
Define how cocaine-strengthened inhibition from dMSNs onto cholinergic interneurons reduces thalamic excitation of these interneurons and acetylcholine release, using dual-channel optogenetics, electrophysiology and genetically encoded ACh sensors.
The school
Oregon Health & Science University: 24 labs on PI Pages, $545M a year on research, 54 research doctorates a year.
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