Journal
NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 362, Issue -, Pages 228-238Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2017.08.047
Keywords
anorexia; maternal behaviors; hunger; preoptic; feeding; Vglut2
Categories
Funding
- National Nature Science Foundation of China Grants [31471065]
- Ministry of Science and Technology Office China 973 program
- Thousand Young Talents Program of China
- Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China [XDB02030005]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Despite recent progress on neural pathways underlying individual behaviors, how an animal balances and prioritizes behavioral outputs remains poorly understood. While studying the relationship between hunger induced feeding and pup-induced maternal behaviors in virgin female mice, we made the unexpected discovery that presence of pups strongly delayed and decreased food consumption. Strikingly, presence of pups also suppressed feeding induced by optogenetic activation of Agrp neurons. Such a suppressive effect inversely correlated with the extents of maternal behaviors, but did not rely on the display of these behaviors, and was also present in virgin males. Furthermore, chemogenetic activation of Vglut2+ neurons in the medial preoptic area (mPOA), a region critical for maternal behaviors and motivation, was sufficient to suppress hunger-induced feeding. However, muscimol inhibition of the mPOA, while disrupting maternal behaviors, did not prevent pup suppression of feeding, indicating that neural pathways in other brain regions may also mediate such an effect. Together, these results provide novel insights into neural coordination of pup care and feeding in mice and organizations of animal behaviors in general. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of IBRO.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available