Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Researchers believe that drugs of abuse act on the part of the brain which functions to regulate our experience of pleasure and reward. According to researchers, drug addiction is a type of memory disorder - but instead of memory loss, drugs of abuse "hijack" the reward circuit in the brain, and promote the learning of drug-related behaviours with such efficiency that these behaviours become compulsive. Similar to learning in other regions of the brain, this learning is mediated by changes at the level of the "synapse". Synapses are specialized junctions where nerve cells communicate with one another. This type of learning occurs in all mammals, so why is it that some people are more prone to addiction than others? Although the exact mechanisms are unknown, experts widely agree that some people are genetically vulnerable to developing addiction disorders. Cadherin adhesion molecules are great candidate proteins that may regulate the predisposition to drug addiction. Indeed, cadherins are 1) expressed in the reward circuitry of the brain, 2) important regulators of learning and memory, and 3) mutated in people with addiction disorders. We will examine the involvement of the cadherins in mediating drug-induced changes in synapses as well as in addictive behaviours.