Our research projects deal with neurochemical and physiological correlates of psychoactive peptides and drugs on arousal mechanisms associated with the cholinergic systems in brain. Common among these alerting drugs is the property of activating these cholinergic pathways to arouse animals from sleep or anesthesia. More recently we have discovered that dopamine and NMDA mechanisms are also involved in this process of cholinergic mediated arousal. We employ behavioral, neurochemical and EEG approaches to determine these responses, and stereotaxic experiments to establish brain sites at which the drugs act. We have also begun to employ the brain microdialysis procedure to determine acetylcholine release in vivo, and this released acetylcholine is quantified by an HPLC-EC or RIA procedure.
Microwave irradiation affects radialarm maze performance in the rat.