Overlapping representations of food and social stimuli in VTA dopamine neurons

Abstract

Dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA-DA) respond to food and social stimuli and contribute to both forms of motivation. However, it is unclear if the same or different VTADA neurons encode these different stimuli. To address this question, we performed 2-photon calcium imaging in mice presented with food and conspecifics, and found statistically significant overlap in the populations responsive to both stimuli. Both hunger and opposite-sex social experience further increased the proportion of neurons that respond to both stimuli, implying that modifying motivation for one stimulus affects responses to both stimuli. In addition, single-nucleus RNA sequencing revealed significant co-expression of feeding- and social-hormone related genes in individual VTA-DA neurons. Taken together, our functional and transcriptional data suggest overlapping VTA-DA populations underlie food and social motivation.

Opioidergic signaling contributes to food-mediated suppression of AgRP neurons

“… 28 Further support comes from the experiments in which, like hunger, chemogenetic modulation of AgRP neuron activity has been shown to alter nucleus accumbens (Nac) DA levels and VTA activity in response to food and drugs, and at least food-dependent DA release is sensitive to the obese state. 28 , 38 , 56 , 57 A plausible mechanism mediating this effect may involve direct AgRP neuronal projections to VTA and subsequent modulation of reward function; 58 , 59 however, midbrain independent pathways could also be involved. 60 , 61 …”

A ventral hippocampal-lateral septum pathway regulates social novelty preference

“…Consistent with this idea, VTA dopamine neurons are known to play a key role in mediating the motivation to seek both food rewards and social investigation [22][23][24][51][52][53][54] . Additionally, a large proportion of individual VTADA neurons respond to both food and social stimuli 55 . VTADA neurons are active during both the consumption of familiar palatable food and during increased investigation of a novel conspecific [22][23][24][51][52][53][54] .…”

Thyroid hormones mediate the impact of early-life stress on ventral tegmental area gene expression and behavior

“…A growing body of work implicates VTA function in depression and anxiety-related behaviors (Berton et al, 2006;Chaudhury et al, 2013;Friedman et al, 2014; Bennett, Chang et al, Thyroid hormones mediate the impact of early-life stress Hanson et al, 2021;Krishnan et al, 2007;Tye et al, 2013;Willmore et al, 2023). Our previous work found ELS led to enduring changes in gene expression in VTA, mediated by transient suppression of the transcription factor Otx2 (Peña et al, 2017).…”