"Dad, don't hit me!" The sub-published "Nature" reveals how the "nature" of evading punishment and expecting rewards comes from

▎Editor of WuXi AppTec's content team Let us try to recall: Since when will we be eager to get rewards from our parents, but afraid of being punished? In other words, is our attitude towards rewards and punishments formed in practice after the day after tomorrow, or is it "engraved in DNA"? If you can’t recall it, a study published in "Nature Neuroscience" is enough to provide clues: The research team found a neural circuit that handles reward and punishment separately, and found that some neurons are "born" to be responsible for reward or punishment.
Signal transmission
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This research was completed by Professor Li Bo's team at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States
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A year ago, Professor Li Bo’s team discovered in a mouse study that, as a structure closely related to the production and regulation of emotions, the amygdala located in the limbic system of the brain not only deals with fear, as confirmed by previous studies.
The center is also an important place for processing rewards
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In the latest research, they hope to go further and find out which specific neural circuits are involved in these processes
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▲Professor Li Bo led the research (picture source: Professor Li Bo's personal homepage) To this end, the research team first trained mice
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Like Pavlov’s conditioned reflex experiment, this research associates different types of specific sounds with rewards or punishments through training-rewards are given to the mice with a sip of water, and punishments are given to the mice’s beards.
A puff of air
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With well-trained mice, to observe the activity of neurons in real time, the research team also needs to develop methods to label different neurons in the mouse amygdala
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To this end, Professor Li Bo cooperated with Professor Huang Zuoshi who also worked in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and found a solution with the help of optogenetics
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They used the Fezf2 gene, a gene that is selectively expressed in the amygdala, which is essential for the development of pyramidal neurons here
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The research team performed real-time imaging of neurons expressing the Fezf2 gene and found that in the entire amygdala region, there are two types of neurons with different functions: one type is activated when the mouse hears sounds related to rewards and processes reward stimuli ; The other is the opposite, responsible for dealing with punishment stimuli
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And even if the mice are not trained, whether it is a burst of air or a mouthful of water, the same neurons will be activated
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It can be explained that some neurons in the amygdala region seem to assume different roles innately
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▲The green-labeled neurons and neuron connections process positive stimuli, making the mice eager for rewards; the red ones make the mice try to avoid punishment (picture source: reference [2]; Credit: Xian Zhang/Li lab/CSHL , 2021) Professor Li Bo said: “In space, these two types of neurons are interleaved
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We know that some of these neurons will only respond to positive things, while others are just the opposite
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This is like a mixture of pepper and Salt plays a different role
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" ▲When facing rewards and punishments, different types of neurons activate differently (picture source: reference [1]).
In addition, the research team also analyzed the process of participating in rewards and punishments.
Of the neural circuit
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They noticed that the signals of the two types of neurons were sent to two nerve pathways from the amygdala to different areas of the ventral striatum: one of the pathways to the nucleus accumbens allowed the mice to try to avoid punishment; the other One leads to the olfactory nodule, which makes mice eager for rewards
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This is also the first study to find that the nerve pathway from the amygdala to the olfactory nodules is related to the reward and punishment process
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This research not only provides us with a new understanding of related neural pathways, but also hopes to help patients facing specific mental disorders
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The first author of this study, Dr.
Zhang Xian of Li Bo’s laboratory, stated that if the relevant neural circuits are obstructed, “you may face insufficient motivation, such as losing interest in pursuing rewards or avoiding punishment.
” Then there may be depression or other mental disorders
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Based on this new discovery, scientists are expected to reveal the neural mechanism behind this phenomenon
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Reference materials: [1] Zhang, X.
, Guan, W.
, Yang, T.
et al.
Genetically identified amygdala–striatal circuits for valence-specific behaviors.
Nat Neurosci (2021).
https://doi.
org/10.
1038 /s41593-021-00927-0[2] Mammalian motivation circuits: Maybe they're born with it.
Retrieved Oct 18, 2021 from https://