Using female red claws in an intermolt stage, we found that Vg gene expression was significantly dependent on the diet treatment. Among the different tested lipid sources, optimal Vg gene expression level accounting for ovarian maturation was observed with soybean oil diet, characterized by high LA content which is the predominant ovarian poly-unsaturated fatty acid. Lower Vg gene expression was obtained with fish oil and commercial diets, characterized by high EPA and DHA contents. Anticorrelation of Vg and Cq-FABP expressions is suggested in the present study, at least in the LA context, as the soybean oil diet led to the second weakest expression level of Cq-FABP. Altogether, our results highlight a key role of Cq-FABP in female broodstock quality which strongly influences gonad maturation, fecundity and the quality of both eggs and juveniles, according to previous reports. As expected, the presence of a current typically associated with the pacemaking process suggests that it could play its archetypal role also in SNc neurons, cells characterized by autorhythmicity. However, several studies reported that Ih has neither a significant role in spontaneous pacemaker activity nor does it contribute substantially to the setting of the resting potential. Overall, the present knowledge of the h-current in SNc neurons is not entirely satisfactory, and this is all the more surprising for a population of neurons which is object of so many studies. The inconsistencies in the description of Ih are probably due to the strong dependence of the kinetics of this current on experimental conditions. This circumstance may explain why, even for a single cell type, different kinetics were found by different laboratories, and consequently different roles were proposed. In addition, there might be a problem in the cell identification: as a rule, cells in the midbrain are identified as dopaminergic on the basis of a series of electrophysiological characteristics, confirming a Pimozide posteriori the identification in few randomly chosen cells with immunohistochemistry to ascertain the presence of TH. However, some of the more commonly used identification criteria are not really discriminative. For example, the presence of Ih -considered a benchmark- can be misleading, as if the absence of this current in a midbrain neuron is a trustworthy predictor that the cell is not DAergic, its presence does not reliably predict TH co-labeling. A novelty of this study is in the use of a transgenic line of animals that expresses a reporter protein under the TH promoter, allowing the exact identification of each studied neuron as DAergic. In this work we first report a kinetic Benzethonium Chloride characterization of the hcurrent in SNc neurons as close as possible to the physiological conditions, showing that this current at rest is larger than the one usually obtained. Then we describe how the resting membrane potential of the dopaminergic ��principal�� cells are affected by this current. Finally, we show that neurotransmitters physiologically released onto SNc neurons can modulate the h-current, thereby affecting the overall excitability profile of these cells. The classical procedure to calculate the reversal potential of a voltage sensitive conductance is from the tail currents reversal, but in SNc neurons this method was rather problematic due to the activation of several outward rectifiers in the membrane potential range over which reversal was expected. It has been shown in various types of preparation that the kinetics of Ih is particularly sensitive to thermic conditions.