ReviewNature reviews. Neuroscience2017
Ventral tegmental area: cellular heterogeneity, connectivity and behaviour.
Review in Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 645 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
645 citing papers in PubMed, 1,131 citations in OpenAlex.
- Transcutaneous auricular nerve stimulation modulates the functional connectivity of the descending pain modulation system and reward network in patients with chronic low back pain.Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics · 2025Trial
- The functional role of opioidergic system within the ventral tegmental area and the dentate gyrus of hippocampus in modulation of the persistent inflammatory pain in the rats.IBRO neuroscience reports · 2026Article
- POINTseq: Cell-type-specific barcoding reveals single-cell projection architecture of the mouse dopaminergic system.Neuron · 2026Article
- Extinction-recruited prefrontal-hypothalamic pathway encodes positive affect to sustain fear extinction in posttraumatic stress mouse model.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2026Article
- Pathway-Level Synthesis Reveals Contrast-Dependent Rat Brain Transcriptomic Responses to Alcohol.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- The role of subcortical brain tissue iron as an indicator of dopamine neurophysiology in adolescent cannabis use.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Hypothalamic-amygdala gating of caregiving-like prosocial behavior in mice.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2026Article
- A vasopressin gate transforms social distress into caregiving.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2026Article
- Endocannabinoid metabolism at VTA GABAergic neurons gates motivation for social, but not food, reward.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Regulation of amygdala and dopamine system in naïve and chronic alcohol states.Alcohol (Fayetteville, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Brain-Wide Mapping and Synaptic Localization of C1QL3 Using a Novel Epitope-Tagged Knock-In Mouse.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2026Article
- The Anatomical Connections of Nucleus Accumbens with Brainstem and Cerebellum in the Rat and Human Subjects.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2026Article
- Transcriptional plasticity of ventral tegmental area neurons induced after cessation of chronic cocaine exposure is required for incubation of cocaine seeking.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Oculomotor Dance Task: Implications for Audio-Visual-Cued Spatial Learning.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Supraspinal Circuit Mechanisms Underlying Itch Processing.CNS neuroscience & therapeutics · 2026Review
- Cell-type targeted CRISPR/Cas9 Clock knockdown in mouse VTA dopamine neurons alter sleep, behavior, and cellular excitability.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A Novel Role of Dexmedetomidine in the Modulation of Morphine Reward Memory via γ-Aminobutyric Acid Transporter-1.Anesthesiology · 2026Article
- AAV-only targeting of ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons for optical self-stimulation studies in mice.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Motor-to-Limbic Design of Direct Synaptic Communication between Dopamine Neurons in the Midbrain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
585 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Dopamine-releasing neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) have central roles in reward-related and goal-directed behaviours. VTA dopamine-releasing neurons are heterogeneous in their afferent and efferent connectivity and, in some cases, release GABA or glutamate in addition to dopamine. Recent findings show that motivational signals arising from the VTA can also be carried by non-dopamine-releasing projection neurons, which have their own specific connectivity. Both dopamine-releasing and non-dopamine-releasing VTA neurons integrate afferent signals with local inhibitory or excitatory inputs to generate particular output firing patterns. Various individual inputs, outputs and local connections have been shown to be sufficient to generate reward- or aversion-related behaviour, indicative of the impressive contribution of this small population of neurons to behaviour.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.