Role of the postinspiratory complex in regulating swallow-breathing coordination and other laryngeal behaviors
Abstract
Breathing needs to be tightly coordinated with upper airway behaviors, such as swallowing. Discoordination leads to aspiration pneumonia, the leading cause of death in neurodegenerative disease. Here we study the role of the Postinspiratory Complex (PiCo) in coordinating breathing and swallowing. Using optogenetic approaches in freely breathing- anesthetized ChATcre:Ai32, Vglut2cre:Ai32 and intersectional recombination of ChATcre:Vglut2FlpO:ChR2 mice reveals PiCo mediates airway protective behaviors. Activation of PiCo during inspiration or the beginning of postinspiration triggers swallow behavior in an all-or-nothing manner, while there is a higher probability for stimulating only laryngeal activation when activated further into expiration. Laryngeal activation is dependent on stimulation duration. Sufficient bilateral PiCo activation is necessary for preserving the physiologic swallow motor sequence, since activation of only a few PiCo neurons or unilateral activation leads to blurred upper airway behavioral responses. We believe PiCo acts as an interface between the swallow pattern generator and the preBötzinger complex to coordinate swallow and breathing. Investigating PiCo's role in swallow and laryngeal coordination will aid in understanding discoordination with breathing in neurological diseases.
Data availability
All data is publicly available (10.6084/m9.figshare.21909819).
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Huff et al. 2023 Experimental Data Set10.6084/m9.figshare.21909819.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (HL090554)
- Jan-Marino Ramirez
National Institutes of Health (HL144801)
- Jan-Marino Ramirez
National Institutes of Health (HL151389)
- Jan-Marino Ramirez
National Institutes of Health (HL160102-01)
- Alyssa D Huff
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 experiments and animal procedures were approved by the Seattle Children's Research Institute's Animal Care and Use Committee and were conducted in accordance with the National Institutes of Health guidelines.(IACUC #0058)
Copyright
© 2023, Huff 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.
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