PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Michael Crossley
AU  - Kevin Staras
AU  - György Kemenes
TI  - A central control circuit for encoding perceived food value
AID  - 10.1101/368969
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 368969
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/13/368969.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/13/368969.full
AB  - Hunger state can substantially alter the perceived value of a stimulus, even to the extent that the same sensory cue can trigger antagonistic behaviors. How the nervous system uses such graded perceptual shifts to select between opposed motor patterns remains enigmatic. Here we challenged food-deprived and satiated Lymnaea to choose between two mutually exclusive behaviors, ingestion or egestion, produced by the same feeding central pattern generator. Decoding the underlying neural circuit reveals that the activity of central dopaminergic interneurons defines hunger state and drives network reconfiguration, biasing satiated animals towards the rejection of stimuli deemed palatable by food-deprived ones. By blocking the action of these neurons, satiated animals can be reconfigured to exhibit a hungry animal phenotype. This centralized mechanism occurs in the complete absence of sensory retuning and generalizes across different sensory modalities, allowing food-deprived animals to increase their perception of food value in a stimulus-independent manner to maximize potential calorific intake.