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Dec 9, 2025
Study reveals how brain protein KCC2 influences reward learning
News-Medical.net
Georgetown University Medical CenterDec 9 2025
A new finding from researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center shows that the learning process of associating cues with rewards can be altered by increased or decreased activity of a specific protein in the brain. Knowing when to respond positively to cues that result in beneficial outcomes or rewards vs. ignoring cues that result in bad habits, such as smoking addiction, is an essential part of learned behaviors.
Our ability to link certain cues or stimuli with positive or rewarding experiences is a basic brain process, and it is disrupted in many conditions such as addiction, depression, and schizophrenia. For example, drug abuse can cause changes in the KCC2 protein that is crucial for normal learning. By interfering with this mechanism, addictive substances can hijack the learning process."
Alexey Ostroumov, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Physiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine and senior author of the study
The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study appears December 9 in the journal Nature Communications.
The investigators found that changes in the learning process can happen because of changes in KCC2. In what is an inverse relationship, diminished KCC2 levels can cause increased dopamine neuron firing, which in turn leads to new reward associations being formed. Dopamine neurons are specialized nerve cells that produce and release the neurotransmitter dopamine that is involved in reward, motivation, and motor control.
The researchers looked at rodent brain tissue and also observed the behaviors of lab rats in classic Pavlovian cue-reward experiments, where a signal such as a short sound notifies the rats that they will receive a sugar cube. Beyond just determining how accelerated or diminished neuron firings are related to changes in KCC2, the investigators also found that when neurons act in a synchronized way, they can unexpectedly increase do
