Background: Taste receptors (TASRs) are essential for the body's recognition of chemical compounds. In the tongue, TASRs sense the sweet and umami and the toxin-related bitter taste thus promoting a particular eating behaviour. Moreover, their relevance in other organs is now becoming evident. In the intestine, they regulate nutrient absorption and gut motility. Upon ligand binding, TASRs activate the appetite-reward circuitry to signal the nervous system and keep body homeostasis. With the aim to identify genetic variation in the swine TASRs and in the genes from the appetite and the reward pathways, we have sequenced the exons of 201 TASRs and appetite-reward genes from 304 pigs belonging to ten breeds, wild boars and to two phenotypically extreme groups from a F2 resource with data on growth and fat deposition.
Results: We identified 2,766 coding variants 395 of which were predicted to have a strong impact on protein sequence and function. 334 variants were present in only one breed and at predicted alternative allele frequency (pAAF) ≥ 0.1. The Asian pigs and the wild boars showed the largest proportion of breed specific variants. We also compared the pAAF of the two F2 groups and found that variants in TAS2R39 and CD36 display significant differences suggesting that these genes could influence growth and fat deposition. We developed a 128-variant genotyping assay and confirmed 57 of these variants.
Conclusions: We have identified thousands of variants affecting TASRs as well as genes involved in the appetite and the reward mechanisms. Some of these genes have been already associated to taste preferences, appetite or behaviour in humans and mouse. We have also detected indications of a potential relationship of some of these genes with growth and fat deposition, which could have been caused by changes in taste preferences, appetite or reward and ultimately impact on food intake. A genotyping array with 57 variants in 31 of these genes is now available for genotyping and start elucidating the impact of genetic variation in these genes on pig biology and breeding.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12864-016-2972-z | DOI Listing |
Biol Psychol
December 2024
Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignal Analysis, University of Münster, Germany; Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Münster, Germany, Krakow, 2024-12-28.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is widely linked with emotional phenomena, including appraisal, modulation, and reward processing. Its perigenual part is suggested to mediate the appetitive value of stimulation. In our previous study, besides changes in evoked MEG responses, we were able to induce an apparent behavioral bias toward more positive valence while interpreting the ambiguous, morphed faces after the effect of excitatory tDCS stimulation of the perigenual ventromedial cortex (pgVM).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Hum Neurosci
December 2024
Department of Information Medicine, National Institute of Neuroscience, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Tokyo, Japan.
Accurate interoceptive processing in decision-making is essential to maintain homeostasis and overall health. Disruptions in this process have been associated with various psychiatric conditions, including depression. Recent studies have focused on nutrient homeostatic dysregulation in depression for effective subtype classification and treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Biol
December 2024
Department of Neurobiology, University of Utah, 20 S 2030 E, BPRB 490D, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA. Electronic address:
Integrative studies of diverse neuronal networks that govern social behavior are hindered by a lack of methods to record neural activity comprehensively across the entire brain. The recent development of the miniature fish Danionella cerebrum as a model organism offers one potential solution, as the small size and optical transparency of these animals make it possible to visualize circuit activity throughout the nervous system. Here, we establish the feasibility of using Danionella as a model for social behavior and socially reinforced learning by showing that adult fish exhibit strong affiliative tendencies and that social interactions can serve as the reinforcer in an appetitive conditioning paradigm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommun Biol
December 2024
Department of Physiology, Kochi Medical School, Kochi University, Kochi, Japan.
While olfactory behaviors are influenced by neuromodulatory signals, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. The olfactory tubercle (OT), a component of the olfactory cortex and ventral striatum, consists of anteromedial (am) and lateral (l) domains regulating odor-guided attractive and aversive behaviors, respectively, in which the amOT highly expresses various receptors for feeding-regulated neuromodulators. Here we show functions of appetite-stimulating orexin-1 receptor (OxR1) signaling in the amOT.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurobiol Learn Mem
December 2024
Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University Sapporo 060-0810, Japan; Research Institute for Electronic Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0812, Japan. Electronic address:
Social learning, learning from other individuals, has been demonstrated in many animals, including insects, but its detailed neural mechanisms remain virtually unknown. We showed that crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus) exhibit aversive social learning with a dead conspecific. When a learner cricket was trained to observe a dead cricket on a drinking apparatus, the learner avoided the odor of that apparatus thereafter.
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