I also started in an architecture program and then transitioned to neuroscience - maybe something to this!

Congratulations Ishmail - incredibly well deserved! I'm excited to follow the many fundamental questions you will be able to answer with this research program!

Congratulations Beth! We are so happy to have you at UAB, and this is a well deserved honor!

Very cool work David! Interesting that opioids produce rewarding effects at doses that are 30 times lower than the doses required to produce analgesic effects. These kinds of careful dose response studies are incredibly useful to the entire field!

Thanks David! I hope it is useful - we have made the object available on Zenodo but let me know if there is anything specific you'd like to know about the dataset!

As always, data for this manuscript will be freely available at www.ratlas.org or via direct download (please see GEO accession number of Zenodo links in preprint).

Collectively, these findings reveal that glial cells within reward circuits undergo profound transcriptional responses to opioids through indirect, stress-hormone mediated mechanisms, highlighting a previously unappreciated non-neuronal contribution to opioid-induced neural adaptations.

A final note, buried in a supplemental figure but still very cool. The main place we saw interactions between pain and opioid exposure was in astrocytes as well. Here, pain states often created gene expression changes that were rescued by morphine administration!

Next, we generated an astrocyte-targeted CRISPR tool to allow us to knock down NR3C1 in this population, and found that this also completely blocked the ability of cortisol to induce FKBP5.