Interneuronal Mechanisms Behind Negative Response to Food Identified

If you can’t  stomach the smell of rotisserie chicken due to one bad experience years ago, new research from the University of Sussex suggests there might be a way to help you forget the negative experience and enjoy the tasty convenience food again.

Using sugar-loving snails as models, the team sought to understand how bad experiences with food impact our brain and future eating habits. Like many other animals, snails like sugar and usually start feeding on it as soon as it is presented to them. But through aversive training that involved tapping the snails gently on the head when sugar appeared, the snails' behavior was altered and they refused to feed on the sugar, even when hungry.

When the team looked a little closer, they discovered a neuronal mechanism that effectively reversed the snails' usual response to sugar after the conditioning training had taken place. "There's a neuron in the snail's brain which normally suppresses the feeding circuit. This is important, as the network is prone to becoming spontaneously activated, even in the absence of any food. By suppressing the feeding circuit, it ensures that the snail doesn't just eat everything and anything. But when sugar or other food stimulus is present, this neuron becomes inhibited so that feeding can commence,” Ildiko Kemenes, senior author of the paper published recently in Current Biology, explained.

"After the aversive training, we found that this neuron reverses its electrical response to sugar and becomes excited instead of inhibited by it. Effectively, a switch has been flipped in the brain which means the snail no longer eats the sugar when presented with it, because sugar now suppresses rather than activates feeding."

When researchers presented the trained snails with a piece of cucumber instead, they found that the animal was still happy to eat the healthy option—showing that the taps were associated with only the particular type of food they were trained to reject.

The also reported that when the neuron was removed entirely from trained snails, they returned to eating sugar again. "This suggests that the neuron is necessary for the expression of the learned behaviour and for altering the response to sugar,” Ildiko Kemene added. "However, we cannot rule out that the sugar-activated sensory pathway also undergoes some changes, so we don't make the assumption that this is all that's happening in the brain."

According to George Kemenes, a senior member of the investigator team, "Snails provide us with a similar yet exceptionally basic model of how human brains work. The effect of the inhibitory neuron which suppresses the feeding circuit in the snail is quite similar to how, in the human brain, cortical networks are under inhibitory control to avoid 'runaway' activation which may lead to overeating resulting in obesity.”