No evidence for sex differences in the electrophysiological properties and excitatory synaptic input onto nucleus accumbens shell medium spiny neurons

Sex differences exist in how the brain regulates motivated behavior and reward, both in normal and pathological contexts. Investigations into the underlying neural mechanisms have targeted the striatal brain regions, including the dorsal striatum and nucleus accumbens core and shell. These investigations yield accumulating evidence of sexually different electrophysiological properties, excitatory synaptic input, and sensitivity to neuromodulator/hormone action in select striatal regions both before and after puberty. It is unknown whether the electrical properties of neurons in the nucleus accumbens shell differ by sex and whether sex differences in excitatory synaptic input are present before puberty. To test the hypothesis that these properties differ by sex, we performed whole-cell patch-clamp recordings on male and female medium spiny neurons (MSNs) in acute brain slices obtained from prepubertal rat nucleus accumbens shell. We analyzed passive and active electrophysiological proper..., This dataset was collected using whole-cell patch clamp recordings of medium spiny neurons in prepubertal male and female rat nucleus accumbens shell. The recordings were analyzed to generate standard attributes describing the biophysical properties of these neurons. Please see Willett et al., 2016, eNeuro, for further details: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27022621/. , Microsoft Excel and Word. There are many alternatives for accessing these files other than using these specific programs. For example, the spreadsheet and README can be opened with Google Docs and Apache OpenOffice.