Priority CommunicationHippocampal Input to the Nucleus Accumbens Shell Enhances Food Palatability
Section snippets
Experimental Subjects
Adult wild-type (Charles River, Saint-Constant, Quebec, Canada) and transgenic (bred in-house) C57BL/6J mice were used, including D1 receptor-Cre (JAX #37156) (40), pENK::IRES2-Cre (JAX #025112) (41), tyrosine hydroxylase::IRES-Cre (42), and tdTomato Cre-reporter (JAX #007914) mice (Jackson Laboratory, Sacramento, CA). See the Supplemental Methods for more details about these transgenic animals. All groups had relatively balanced numbers of male and female mice. Animals were group housed in
Number of LPB of Consumption Correlates With Palatability
Rodents drink liquids by licking in well-defined bouts (44). The number of LPB strongly correlates with palatability (45), whereas total consumption is mainly motivated by metabolic need and the caloric content of the food (44). We sought to validate the measure of LPB as an index of hedonic impact because it can be quantified in an automated, high-throughput manner. In concordance with the evidence that rodents’ preference for sweetened water is a direct function of the sugar content (46), we
Discussion
To identify the NAcSh circuit components that regulate hedonic processing, we manipulated its input pathways and projection neurons using LPB as a measure of palatability. Prolonged photoinhibition of NAcSh projection neurons influenced consumption but not hedonic impact, while time-locked inhibition affected neither. Time-locked high-frequency photostimulation of all examined cell types and afferent pathways prematurely ended lick bouts, whereas low-frequency stimulation of only the vHipp
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
This research was supported by the Fonds de recherche Santé, Quebec (Grant No. 259887 [to AKY]), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Grant No. 05069-2014 [to JPB]), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Grant No. PT-74038 [to JPB]), and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (Grant No. 32477 [to JPB]).
We thank Shira Mattuck, Veronica Le, Jiamin Song, Julia Akimoto, Camille Bouchard, and Ashley Jussaume for assistance with the behavioral experiments. The confocal images
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Cited by (23)
Palatability attributed to alcohol and alcohol-paired flavors
2024, Physiology and BehaviorAlcohol dependence and the ventral hippocampal influence on alcohol drinking in male mice
2023, AlcoholCitation Excerpt :In fact, some reports indicate the involvement of the vHC in negatively regulating feeding behavior (Briggs et al., 2021; Ferbinteanu & McDonald, 2001; Hannapel et al., 2017, 2019), findings broadly consistent with the present findings. On the other hand, a recent paper showed that optogenetically activating the vHC-to-NAc pathway could condition a flavor preference to a sucrose solution (Yang, Mendoza, Lafferty, Lacroix, & Britt, 2020), underscoring the complexity of vHC function and, in light of the data presented here, indicating that there are potential differences in the role of vHC in drinking natural reinforcers versus alcohol. While some of these previous findings might suggest a lack of selectivity toward alcohol, it is worth noting that activating the excitatory pathway only reduced drinking in alcohol-dependent mice and not the CTL mice.
Neural correlates of ‘Liking’ and ‘Wanting’ in short-term eating behaviours and long-term energy balance
2022, Current Opinion in Behavioral SciencesCitation Excerpt :Exploring the connectivity of the accumbens hotspot has led to advances in our understanding of networks as a more general organising principle of the brain [8]. Recently, Yang and colleagues [9] targeted neurons projecting to the accumbens shell from the prefrontal cortex, paraventricular thalamus, basolateral amygdala and ventral hippocampus. They found that only stimulation of ventral hippocampal inputs increased ‘liking’ (as measured by lick microstructure) in both food-restricted and sated conditions, providing evidence for a novel circuit mechanism influencing sucrose ‘liking’.