Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA; Faculty of Medicine, Technion, Haifa 3525433, Israel.
Neuron. 2023 Nov 15;111(22):3541-3553.e8. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2023.08.003. Epub 2023 Aug 31.
Dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) respond to food and social stimuli and contribute to both forms of motivation. However, it is unclear whether the same or different VTA neurons encode these different stimuli. To address this question, we performed two-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 increasing motivation for one stimulus increases overlap. In addition, single-nucleus RNA sequencing revealed significant co-expression of feeding- and social-hormone-related genes in individual VTA neurons. Taken together, our functional and transcriptional data suggest overlapping VTA populations underlie food and social motivation.
腹侧被盖区（VTA）的多巴胺神经元对食物和社交刺激做出反应，并为这两种形式的动机做出贡献。然而，尚不清楚相同或不同的 VTA 神经元是否对这些不同的刺激进行编码。为了解决这个问题，我们在呈现食物和同种动物的小鼠中进行了双光子钙成像，发现对这两种刺激有反应的群体在统计学上有显著的重叠。饥饿和异性社交体验进一步增加了对两种刺激都有反应的神经元比例，这意味着对一种刺激的动机增加会增加重叠。此外，单细胞 RNA 测序显示，在单个 VTA 神经元中，与摄食和社交激素相关的基因存在显著的共表达。总之，我们的功能和转录组数据表明，食物和社交动机是由重叠的 VTA 群体介导的。
