Divergent prefrontal cortex circuits regulate cued food seeking under distinct metabolic or emotional states

Xu O. Zhang, Guillermo Aquino-Miranda, Claire E. Cho, Yongzhe Wang, Duy Hoang Ha, Nikita Elinson-Watson, Allen Dong, Caleb Kemere and Fabricio H. Do-Monte ()
Additional contact information
Xu O. Zhang: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Guillermo Aquino-Miranda: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Claire E. Cho: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Yongzhe Wang: City of Hope, Department of Population Science and Surgery
Duy Hoang Ha: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Nikita Elinson-Watson: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Allen Dong: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Caleb Kemere: Rice University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Fabricio H. Do-Monte: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: Abstract Flexibly adjusting food-seeking behaviour in response to food-associated cues and internal states is crucial for animals’ survival. However, the neural mechanisms that modulate cued food-seeking behaviour during varying metabolic (i.e., hungry vs. satiated) and emotional (i.e., safe vs. threatened) states remain elusive. Here, we show that the encoding of metabolic or threat states in projection-defined neurons in the prelimbic cortex (PL) mediates cued food-seeking responses in rats. Using microendoscopic imaging, we demonstrate that neural population dynamics in PL consistently represent food cues, task-relevant behaviours, and internal state changes by recruiting distinct subsets of cue-responsive neurons at each state. Single-unit recording and loss-of-function experiments reveal that activity in divergent PL projections to the anterior paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (aPVT) or the nucleus accumbens (NAc) promotes either hedonic feeding during satiation or food-seeking suppression during threat, respectively. Together, our findings uncover a mechanism by which divergent PL circuits regulate cued food-seeking under distinct metabolic or emotional states.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65347-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-65347-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-65347-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().