We have just published a new web page that deals with the hedonic regulation of food intake. This is a timely subject because a good understanding of how pleasure drives us to eat (in excess) may be key in developing new medicaments that aim to temper our ferocious appetite. In this webpage the students of the signal transduction course SVI632 (held in 2009) have explored the role of "reward pathways" in the decision-taking process that determines whether or not we engage in eating. In this webpage we describe that food provides a sense of pleasure. What exactly constitutes this pleasure signal is far from clear but dopamine reward pathways are certainly involved. We describe the neuro-anatomy of the dopamine reward pathways and we discuss the neuromediators that hook in to these pathways (endocannabinoids, endorphines, serotonin, acetylcholine). Finally we show that brain areas that constitute the dopamine reward pathways also express receptors for the mediators of homeostatic regulation (insulin, leptin, ghrelin, a-MSH, AgRP or Npyp) and modulate dopamine release. Read more