An ongoing saga of nicotine complexity and dopamine heterogeneity: Nicotine activation and inhibition mediating reward and anxiety

In this issue of Neuron, Nguyen and colleagues (Nguyen et al., 2021) investigate nicotine’s effects on diverse midbrain dopamine neurons. Their findings provide new understanding of the functional role of ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons and reveal topographically distinct, pathway-specific, and opposite dopaminergic responses to nicotine that likely mediate reward and anxiety, respectively.