NB & CNS Seminar - Rui Chang | Tuesday, March 19 2024 at 12 pm

Date: March 19, 2024

Reception: 11:30 am

Time: 12 pm

Location: Broad 100

Speaker: Rui Chang, Assistant Professor

Neuroscience and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology

Yale School of Medicine

Host: Tongtong Wang

Interoception, the ability to timely and precisely sense changes inside the body, is critical for survival. Vagal sensory neurons (VSNs) form an important body-to-brain connection, navigating visceral organs along the rostral–caudal axis of the body and crossing the surface–lumen axis of organs into appropriate tissue layers. The brain can discriminate numerous body signals through VSNs, but the underlying coding strategy remains poorly understood. Here we show that VSNs code visceral organ, tissue layer and stimulus modality—three key features of an interoceptive signal—in different dimensions. The three independent feature-coding dimensions together specify many parallel VSN pathways in a combinatorial manner and facilitate the complex projection of VSNs in the brainstem. Our study highlights a multidimensional coding architecture of the mammalian vagal interoceptive system for effective signal communication.