Biology subjects

Tanaka, D. H.

Publications and source records attributed to Tanaka, D. H..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Innate liking and disgust reactions elicited by intraoral capsaicin in male mice

Liking and disgust are the primary positive and negative emotions, respectively, and are crucial for nutrient intake and toxin avoidance. These emotions are induced by multimodal stimuli such as taste, olfactory, and somatosensory inputs, and their dysregulation is evident in various psychiatric disorders. To understand the biological basis of liking and disgust, it is crucial to establish an animal model that allows for quantitative estimation of liking and disgust in response to multimodal stimuli. The only readout shared by many species, including humans, for liking and disgust, has been taste reactivity. However, readouts of non-taste stimuli-induced emotions remain unestablished. Here, we show that intraoral administration of capsaicin, a chemosomatosensory stimulus, elicits orofacial and bodily reactions in male mice similar to those observed in taste reactivity. Capsaicin induced liking reactions at low concentrations and disgust reactions at high concentrations. Capsaicin-induced disgust reactions consisted of various reactions, including gape and forelimb flail, with the proportion of each reaction among the disgust reactions being similar to that induced by bitter and sour stimuli. These findings indicate that orofacial and bodily reactions, defined as taste reactivity, are elicited not only by taste stimuli, but also by intraoral chemosomatosensory stimuli. Understanding the biological basis of capsaicin-induced orofacial and bodily reactions will advance our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying liking and disgust across sensory modalities.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Automatic quantification of disgust taste reactivity in mice using machine learning

Disgust, a primary negative emotion, plays a vital role in protecting organisms from intoxication and infection. In rodents, this emotion has been quantified by measuring the specific reactions elicited by exposure to unpleasant tastes. These reactions were captured on video and manually analyzed, a process that required considerable time and effort. Here we developed a method to automatically count disgust reactions in mice by using machine learning. The disgust reactions were automatically tracked using DeepLabCut as the coordinates of the nose and both front and rear paws. The automated tracking data were split into test and training data, and the latter were combined with manually labeled data on whether a disgust reaction was present and, if so, which type of disgust reaction was present. Then, a random forest classifier was constructed, and the performance of the classifier was evaluated in the test dataset. The total number of disgust reactions estimated by the classifier highly correlated with those counted manually (Pearsons r = 0.98). The present method will decrease the time and effort required to analyze disgust reactions, thus facilitating the implementation of the taste reactivity test in large-scale screening and long-term experiments that necessitate quantifying a substantial number of disgust reactions.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2022

Whole-Brain Three-Dimensional Imaging of RNAs at Single-Cell Resolution

Whole-brain three-dimensional (3D) imaging is desirable to obtain a comprehensive and unbiased view of architecture and neural circuitry. However, current spatial analytic methods for brain RNAs are limited to thin sections or small samples. Here, we combined multiple new techniques to develop TRIC-DISCO, a new pipeline that allows imaging of RNA spatial distributions in whole adult mouse brains. First, we developed Tris-mediated retention of in situ hybridization signal during clearing (TRIC), which produces highly transparent tissue while maintaining the RNA signal intensities. We then combined TRIC with DISCO clearing (TRIC-DISCO) by controlling temperature during the in situ hybridization chain reaction (isHCR) to ensure uniform whole-brain staining. This pipeline eliminates the requirements for both strict RNase-free environments and workflow-compatible RNase inhibitors. Our TRIC-DISCO pipeline enables simple and robust, single-cell, whole-brain, 3D imaging of transcriptional signatures, cell-identity markers, and noncoding RNAs across the entire brain.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Activity-dependent genetic recombination in disgust-associated bitter taste-responsive neurons of the central nucleus of amygdala in male mice

A bitter substance induces specific orofacial and somatic behavioral reactions such as gapes in mice as well as monkeys and humans. These reactions have been proposed to represent affective disgust, and therefore, understanding the neuronal basis of the reactions would pave the way to understand affective disgust. It is crucial to identify and access the specific neuronal ensembles that are activated by bitter substances, such as quinine, the intake of which induces disgust reactions. However, the method to access the quinine-activated neurons has not been fully established yet. Here, we show evidence that a targeted recombination in active populations (TRAP) method, induces genetic recombination in the quinine-activated neurons in the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA). CeA is one of the well-known emotional centers of the brain. We found that the intraoral quinine infusion, that resulted in disgust reactions, increased both cFos-positive cells and Arc-positive cells in the CeA. By using Arc-CreER;Ai3 TRAP mice, we induced genetic recombination in the quinine-activated neurons and labelled them with fluorescent protein. We confirmed that the quinine-TRAPed fluorescently-labelled cells preferentially coexpressed Arc after quinine infusion. Our results suggest that the TRAP method can be used to access specific functional neurons in the CeA.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

CHANCE: a method that enables a researcher to fully know the content of consciousness of a subject in scientific experiments

The content of consciousness (cC) constitutes an essential part of human life and is at the very heart of the hard problem of consciousness. The cC of a person (e.g., study participant) has been examined indirectly by evaluating the persons behavioral reports, bodily signs, or neural signals. However, the measures do not reflect the full spectrum of the persons cC. In this paper, we define a method, called "CHANging Consciousness Epistemically" (CHANCE), to consciously experience a cC that would be identical to that experienced by another person, and thus directly know the entire spectrum of the others cC. In addition, the ontologically subjective knowledge about a persons cC may be considered epistemically objective and scientific data. The CHANCE method comprises two empirical steps: (1) identifying the minimally sufficient, content-specific neural correlates of consciousness (mscNCC) and (2) reproducing a specific mscNCC in different brains.

neuroscience↗