Research aiming to understand how behavior arises has historically focused on the brain. However, the brain is not isolated from the rest of the body: peripheral organs like the gut produce a repertoire of unexplored signals that communicate with the brain and influence behavioral decisions. The focus of the lab is to identify novel peripheral organ signaling pathways and determine how they influence behaviors such as sleep and substance use disorder.
Sleep is essential for life, and poor sleep quality represents a risk factor for metabolic and psychiatric disorders. While sleep duration has been extensively investigated, sleep depth, which is equally important because of its restorative functionovers, is understudied due to the challenges in measuring it. We have developed a behavioral setup that allows us to investigate how dietary manipulations and their effect on gut secretory signaling pathways affect sleep depth.
Diet imbalances are also a strong predictor for substance use disorder and we have developed novel assays showing that dietary changes can alter psychostimulant preference.
We found that a peripheral signal, a neuropeptide from the gut, changes the internal state of the animal and promotes deeper sleep by activating dopaminergic neurons. We still don’t know what this signaling pathway does to the neurons to reduce responsiveness to external stimulation. Future projects will focus on understanding how the change in internal state encoded within the neuron?
Our overarching goal is to provide crucial and missing molecular mechanistic understanding of how inter-organ signals shape essential and maladaptive behaviors, to enable novel preventive and therapeutic strategies.