The brain and gut are in constant communication, which helps control eating and other behaviors, and new technology has allowed researchers to monitor, in mice, the neurological circuitry that connects the two organs.
Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the USA, publish in Nature Biotechnology a study on this new technique, to control the neurological circuits that influence hunger, mood and various diseases, reported Thursday the Efe agency.
Using sensor-equipped fibers as well as light sources for optogenetic stimulation, the researchers demonstrated that they can control the neurological circuitry connecting the gut and the brain, thereby inducing feelings of satiety or reward-seeking behaviors, by manipulating cells. rodent intestines.
In future work, the scientists hope to explore some of the observed correlations between digestive health and neurological conditions such as autism and Parkinson’s disease.
Although the brain was long believed to be “a dictator that sends information to the organs and controls everything, we now know that there is a lot of feedback to the brain, potentially controlling some of the functions that we previously ascribed exclusively.” to the central nervous system,” said study coordinator Polina Anikeeva of MIT.
The team created an interface with which they ran a series of experiments to show that they could influence behavior by manipulating both the gut and the brain.
First, they used the fibers to provide optogenetic stimulation (based on genetic and optical methods) to a part of the brain that releases dopamine.
The rodents were placed in a cage with three compartments, and upon entering one of them, the researchers activated neurons that transmit dopamine, making them more likely to return in search of the reward.
The researchers also found that they could induce this reward-seeking behavior by influencing the gut.
To do this, they used fibers in the gut to release sucrose, which also triggered the release of dopamine in the brain and prompted the animals to search for the room they were in when they received the sucrose.
The next step was to show that it was possible to induce the same reward-seeking behavior by omitting sucrose and optogenously stimulating nerve endings in the gut that provide information to the vagus nerve, which controls digestion and other bodily functions.
The scientists obtained the same behavior as when the stimulus was used in the brain, but now they did not touch that organ.
“We just stimulated the gut and looked at the control of central function from that periphery,” Anikeeva explained.
The researchers now want to use this interface to study neurological conditions thought to have a gut-brain connection.
Source: TSF
