Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA.
Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA; Graduate Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Neuron. 2023 May 3;111(9):1486-1503.e7. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2023.02.012. Epub 2023 Mar 8.
Extracting the valence of environmental cues is critical for animals' survival. How valence in sensory signals is encoded and transformed to produce distinct behavioral responses remains not well understood. Here, we report that the mouse pontine central gray (PCG) contributes to encoding both negative and positive valences. PCG glutamatergic neurons were activated selectively by aversive, but not reward, stimuli, whereas its GABAergic neurons were preferentially activated by reward signals. The optogenetic activation of these two populations resulted in avoidance and preference behavior, respectively, and was sufficient to induce conditioned place aversion/preference. Suppression of them reduced sensory-induced aversive and appetitive behaviors, respectively. These two functionally opponent populations, receiving a broad range of inputs from overlapping yet distinct sources, broadcast valence-specific information to a distributed brain network with distinguishable downstream effectors. Thus, PCG serves as a critical hub to process positive and negative valences of incoming sensory signals and drive valence-specific behaviors with distinct circuits.
提取环境线索的效价对动物的生存至关重要。感觉信号中的效价如何被编码和转化以产生不同的行为反应，目前还不是很清楚。在这里，我们报告说，小鼠脑桥中央灰质（PCG）有助于编码负效价和正效价。PCG 谷氨酸能神经元被厌恶刺激而不是奖励刺激选择性激活，而其 GABA 能神经元则优先被奖励信号激活。这两种群体的光遗传学激活分别导致回避和偏好行为，并且足以诱导条件性位置厌恶/偏好。抑制它们分别减少了感觉诱导的厌恶和食欲行为。这两个功能相反的群体，从重叠但不同的来源接收广泛的输入，将特定效价的信息广播到具有不同下游效应器的分布式大脑网络中。因此，PCG 作为一个关键枢纽，用于处理传入感觉信号的正效价和负效价，并通过不同的回路驱动特定效价的行为。
