Journal
BIOLOGY OPEN
Volume 5, Issue 12, Pages 1869-1873Publisher
COMPANY BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/bio.021634
Keywords
Conditioned taste aversion; Dopamine; Food deprivation; Long-term memory; Lymnaea
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Funding
- Network Joint Research Center for Materials and Devices [2015001]
- KAKENHI grants from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science [24657055, 25291074]
- Waseda University [2016B-068, 2016B-069, 2016S-037]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [227993-2013]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [24657055] Funding Source: KAKEN
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The pond snail Lymnaea learns conditioned taste aversion (CTA) and remembers not to respond to food substances that initially cause a feeding response. The possible relationship between how well snails learn to follow taste-aversion training and brain dopamine contents is not known. We examined this relationship and found the following: first, snails in the act of eating just before the commencement of CTA training were poor learners and had the highest dopamine contents in the brain; second, snails which had an ad libitum access to food, but were not eating just before training, were average learners and had lower dopamine contents; third, snails food-deprived for one day before training were the best learners and had significantly lower contents of dopamine compared to the previous two cohorts. There was a negative correlation between the CTA grades and the brain dopamine contents in these three cohorts. Fourth, snails food-deprived for five days before training were poor learners and had higher dopamine contents. Thus, severe hunger increased the dopamine content in the brain. Because dopamine functions as a reward transmitter, CTA in the severely deprived snails (i.e. the fourth cohort) was thought to be mitigated by a high dopamine content.
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