I'm more than psyched to share that my PhD paper is now out in Neuron! It's also my first paper as both first author and corresponding author, which means even more to me!

Thank my partner Chi-Chieh for her contribution to the most adorable ever graphic abstract 🥰

Did a thing. Got a pretty cool hat 😉

Coming to #SfN2023 and thinking about food 🍔🍕🧋🥨? Stop by my talk on Tues morning (Nov.14) to learn about how eating speed modulates flavors (both smell & taste) and appetite! If you can't make it to the talk, feel free to DM me and chat!

With that, we present you the summary of this paper! Some additional data on different metabolic states and smell ability can be found in Fig. 4. All comments are welcome, please let us know what you think about the paper! 12/n

But wait, what is it even good for? Why do we need to shut down the aPC to eat more? We speculated from an evolutionary perspective, that overeating is actually pro-survival. Since one doesn’t know when is the next meal, it makes sense to eat more than needed at the moment. 11/n

To test that, we did a closed-loop optogenetics exp to suppress the aPC even more and see if we could make the mice eat more...and they DID! This suggests that binge-induced aPC suppression doesn’t just reflect the inner state of the mice, but also affects feeding behaviors. 10/n

We further noticed that level of binge-induced suppression in aPC (but not in GC) correlates with the amount of food intake mice ate during the recording sessions! Does the aPC suppression just reflect the appetite of the mouse or does it have an active role in appetite? 9/n

Does the suppression come from local inhibitory circuits? We surprisingly found that both PV and SST aPC neurons are suppressed upon binge feeding, suggesting the modulation may come from other long-range projections. 8/n

Do mice still smell during binge feeding? We tested with a headfixed 3P microscope and found that mitral cells' response to slow and binge feeding is similar, thus can’t explain the suppression we see in aPC. 7/n

Is this binge-induced suppression only happening in aPC or is it happening everywhere? We recorded from the gustatory cortex (GC), and found the taste representation is stable across feeding rates! An interesting divergence between 2 most crucial flavor components! 6/n

This binge-induced aPC suppression can be observed in almost all different neuronal clusters (based on neuronal responses during slow feeding), except for non-selective feeding activated aPC neurons. 5/n

However, something weird happens 🧐 When mice start binge feeding, most neurons including the food-activated neurons are not firing anymore, despite experiencing the same flavors. 🤯 4/n

We used an Inscopix miniscope to image Ca2+ transients in the olfactory cortex (aPC), giving us a good yield of neurons. In slow feeding, we can identify neurons responding to food (Ensure), water and also non-selective feeding events. 3/n

We all know fast/binge eating usually leads to overeating, but how does it actually work? In this study, we focused on the impact of eating speed/feeding rate on flavor representation, mostly smell 🐽 but also taste 😛 systems. 2/n

Storytime! Please RT/share!

I am hyped to share that my PhD work is now preprinted (also my 1st-1st author paper). It was quite a journey!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
It’s a story about binge eating and flavor, a short thread here: 1/n