Spiking activity of dopaminergic cells in VTA-l during multitude of tasks and conditions

We trained transgenic rats (expressing Cre in TH containing cells) on an operant trial and error task and recorded the activity of dopaminergic neurons in lateral ventral tegmental area (VTA-l). We also recoded the activity of the same cells in a Pavlovian approach task. To confirm the phenotype of recorded cells we expressed excitatory opsin ChR2 using a cre-dependent adeno-associated virus in dopaminergic cells of VTA-l and recorded the response pattern of these individual units to brief blue laser pulses. This dataset contains a total of 29 identified dopaminergic cells recorded from 4 rats. Primary results from of this study were published in Nature 2019: Mohebi, A., Pettibone, J.R., Hamid, A.A., Wong, J.T., Vinson, L.T., Patriarchi, T., Tian, L., Kennedy, R.T. and Berke, J.D., 2019. Dissociable dopamine dynamics for learning and motivation. Nature, 570(7759), pp.65-70.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1235-y