Sensors of Survival Pleiotropic Function and the Regulation of Hunger Circuits

Abstract 

In our laboratory, we address two main questions:

1. What does a hungry brain look like and how does food intake influence brain activity?
2. How does the brain sense, process, and prioritize survival behaviors to guide behavior?

We are interested in deconstructing the neural circuits that underlie the behavioral response to physiological needs in order to better understand how the brain guides behavior in a complex environment. We focus our efforts on essential behaviors – such as food seeking and ingestion – as these robust responses are evolutionarily conserved and amenable for examination in murine models. Maladaptive responses to such basic survival signals lead to improper decisions and have consequences for human health, including metabolic and affective disorders. By understanding the neural coding of adaptive survival behaviors, we aim to establish the framework to understand the dysfunction underlying these disorders.