Enteroendocrine cell types that drive food reward and aversion
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, San Francisco, United States
Abstract
Animals must learn through experience which foods are nutritious and should be consumed, and which are toxic and should be avoided. Enteroendocrine cells (EECs) are the principal chemosensors in the GI tract, but investigation of their role in behavior has been limited by the difficulty of selectively targeting these cells in vivo. Here we describe an intersectional genetic approach for manipulating EEC subtypes in behaving mice. We show that multiple EEC subtypes inhibit food intake but have different effects on learning. Conditioned flavor preference is driven by release of cholecystokinin whereas conditioned taste aversion is mediated by serotonin and substance P. These positive and negative valence signals are transmitted by vagal and spinal afferents, respectively. These findings establish a cellular basis for how chemosensing in the gut drives learning about food.
Data availability
Source data is included in the manuscript. RNA-seq data is available from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GSE203200). Villin-Flp mice have been deposited at Jackson laboratory.
-
Enteroendocrine cell types that drive food reward and aversionNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE203200.
-
Identification of functional enteroendocrine regulators by real-time single-cell differentiation mappingNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE113561.
Article and author information
Author details
Sheyda Mesgarzadeh
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01-DK106399)
- Zachary A Knight
National Institutes of Health (RF1-NS116626)
- Zachary A Knight
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Investigator)
- Zachary A Knight
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental protocols were approved by the University of California, San Francisco IACUC (protocol #AN179674) following the National Institutes of Health guidelines for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
Copyright
© 2022, Bai et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 6,108
- views
-
- 1,273
- downloads
-
- 30
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Enteroendocrine cell types that drive food reward and aversion
eLife 11:e74964.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74964
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Adaptive behavior in complex environments critically relies on the ability to appropriately link specific choices or actions to their outcomes. However, the neural mechanisms that support the ability to credit only those past choices believed to have caused the observed outcomes remain unclear. Here, we leverage multivariate pattern analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and an adaptive learning task to shed light on the underlying neural mechanisms of such specific credit assignment. We find that the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) and hippocampus (HC) code for the causal choice identity when credit needs to be assigned for choices that are separated from outcomes by a long delay, even when this delayed transition is punctuated by interim decisions. Further, we show when interim decisions must be made, learning is additionally supported by lateral frontopolar cortex (lFPC). Our results indicate that lFPC holds previous causal choices in a ‘pending’ state until a relevant outcome is observed, and the fidelity of these representations predicts the fidelity of subsequent causal choice representations in lOFC and HC during credit assignment. Together, these results highlight the importance of the timely reinstatement of specific causes in lOFC and HC in learning choice-outcome relationships when delays and choices intervene, a critical component of real-world learning and decision making.
-
- Neuroscience
Animals navigate the auditory world by recognizing complex sounds, from the rustle of a predator to the call of a potential mate. This ability depends in part on the octopus cells of the auditory brainstem, which respond to multiple frequencies that change over time, as occurs in natural stimuli. Unlike the average neuron, which integrates inputs over time on the order of tens of milliseconds, octopus cells must detect momentary coincidence of excitatory inputs from the cochlea during an ongoing sound on both the millisecond and submillisecond time scale. Here, we show that octopus cells receive inhibitory inputs on their dendrites that enhance opportunities for coincidence detection in the cell body, thereby allowing for responses both to rapid onsets at the beginning of a sound and to frequency modulations during the sound. This mechanism is crucial for the fundamental process of integrating the synchronized frequencies of natural auditory signals over time.
