# Balancing excitatory and inhibitory LHb signaling underlying stress

> **NIH NIH F31** · UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO · 2022 · $39,252

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Over 40 millions individuals in the United States are impacted by stress related disorders, that are highly
comorbid with mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. Cognitive behavioral therapy and decades of
animal literature has established that reinstating a sense of autonomy or behavioral control over a stressful
experience can buffer many of the psychological and behavioral impacts of stress and reduce the severity of
depressive and anxiety-like behaviors. However, it is not entirely known which neurochemical pathways are
recruited by behavioral control to facilitate or hinder this stress resilience. Understanding how neurochemical
signaling dynamics change following stress (with and without behavioral control) and identifying which
projections are responsible for these changes is a foundational step in developing therapeutics for stress
related disorders. To address this, I will implement a rodent model of stressor controllability to 1) identify how
neurochemical signaling dynamics change following behavioral control, in a brain region highly implicated in
mediating the effects of stress and 2) manipulate neurochemical-specific projections to this region that are
implicated in these changes to identify their involvement in stressor controllability. The goal of the proposed
project is to determine how behavioral control impacts discrete neurochemical signaling specifically between
the lateral habenula (LHb) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), two interacting brain regions that play causal
roles in both stress and motivated behavior. The successful completion of these aims will address
mechanistically how behavioral control influences LHb neurochemical signaling and test the hypothesis that
the VTA glutamate → LHb pathway contributes to behavioral deficits following stress experience in the
absence of behavioral control.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10426102
- **Project number:** 5F31MH125569-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO
- **Principal Investigator:** Dillon McGovern
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $39,252
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-08-01 → 2023-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10426102

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10426102, Balancing excitatory and inhibitory LHb signaling underlying stress (5F31MH125569-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10426102. Licensed CC0.

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