Brain Sources of Inhibitory Input to the Rat Rostral Ventrolateral Medulla

Belinda R. Bowman, Natasha N. Kumar, Sarah F. Hassan, Simon McMullan, and Ann K. Goodchild*

Australian School of Advanced Medicine, Macquarie University, 2109, NSW Australia

The RVLM receives inhibitory and excitatory input in order to maintain homeostasis.  However the focus of this article was to investigate sources of GABAergic and preproenkephalin input to the RVLM. They injected CTB into the RVLM.  They used in situ hybridization in order to identify GABAergic and preproenkephalin. They found that there are multiple inhibitory inputs going to RVLM are either GABAergic and/ or encephalin but the most interesting finding 17% of gabaergic inputs come from CVLM.  However CVLM is the major source of tonic GABAergic input to RVLM.