A simple animal model shows how stimuli and states such as smells, stressors, and satiety converge in an olfactory neuron to guide food-seeking behavior. Imagine you live across from a bakery. Sometimes you are hungry and therefore tempted when aromas waft through your window. However, other time
New research by MIT reveals how environment and state are integrated to control behavior. They looked, in detail, at the mechanisms that control the levels of a single olfactory receptor in a single olfactory neuron of theA simple animal model shows how stimuli and states such as smells, stressors, and satiety converge in an olfactory neuron to guide food-seeking behavior.
worm, whose well-defined behavioral states and 302-cell nervous system make the complex problem at least tractable. They emerged with a case study of how, in a crucial olfactory neuron called AWA, many sources of state and sensory information converge to independently throttle the expression of a key smell receptor. The integration of their influence on that receptor’s abundance then determines how AWA guides roaming around for food.
“We were surprised to find that the animal’s internal states could have such an impact on gene expression at the level of sensory neurons — essentially, hunger and stress caused changes in how the animal senses the outside world by changing what sensory neurons respond to,” he says. “We were also excited to see that the chemoreceptor expression wasn’t just depending on one input, but depended on the sum total of external environment, nutritional status, and levels of stress.
For example, in one experiment McLachlan and Flavell’s team showed that while both fed and hungry worms would wriggle toward the receptors’ favorite smells if they were strong enough, only fasted worms could detect fainter concentrations. In another experiment, they found that while hungry worms will slow down to eat upon reaching a food source even as well-fed worms cruise on by, they could make well-fed worms act like fasted ones by artificially overexpressing STR-44.
Flavell and McLachlan note that pathways such as insulin and TORC2 are present in not only other worm sensory neurons but also many other animals, including humans. Moreover, sensory receptors were up-regulated by fasting in more neurons than just AWA. These overlaps suggest that the mechanism they discovered in AWA for integrating information is likely at play in other neurons and maybe in other animals, Flavell says.
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