Transient food insecurity during the juvenile-adolescent period affects adult weight, cognitive flexibility, and dopamine neurobiology

A major challenge for neuroscience, public health, and evolutionary biology is to understand the effects of scarcity and uncertainty on the developing brain. Currently, a significant fraction of children and adolescents worldwide experience insecure access to food. The goal of our work was to test in mice whether the transient experience of insecure versus secure access to food during the juvenile-adolescent period produced lasting differences in learning, decision-making, and the dopamine system in adulthood. We manipulated feeding schedules in mice from postnatal day (P)21 to P40 as food insecure or ad libitum and found that when tested in adulthood (after P60), males with different developmental feeding history showed significant differences in multiple metrics of cognitive flexibility in learning and decision-making. Adult females with different developmental feeding history showed no differences in cognitive flexibility but did show significant differences in adult weight. We next applied reinforcement learning models to these behavioral data. The best fit models suggested that in males, developmental feeding history altered how mice updated their behavior after negative outcomes. This effect was sensitive to task context and reward contingencies. Consistent with these results, in males, we found that the two feeding history groups showed significant differences in the AMPAR/NMDAR ratio of excitatory synapses on nucleus-accumbens-projecting midbrain dopamine neurons and evoked dopamine release in dorsal striatal targets. Together, these data show in a rodent model that transient differences in feeding history in the juvenile-adolescent period can have significant impacts on adult weight, learning, decision-making, and dopamine neurobiology.

Wan Chen Lin, Christine Liu, Polina Kosillo, Lung-Hao Tai, Ezequiel Galarce, Helen S. Bateup, Stephan Lammel, Linda Wilbrecht,
Transient food insecurity during the juvenile-adolescent period affects adult weight, cognitive flexibility, and dopamine neurobiology,
Current Biology, ISSN 0960-9822, (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.089 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222010946

Transient food insecurity during the juvenile-adolescent period affects adult weight, cognitive flexibility, and dopamine neurobiology2022-07-21T23:12:30+00:00

Does puberty mark a transition in sensitive periods for plasticity in the associative neocortex?

Postnatal brain development is studded with sensitive periods during which experience dependent plasticity is enhanced. This enables rapid learning from environmental inputs and reorganization of cortical circuits that matches behavior with environmental contingencies. Significant headway has been achieved in characterizing and understanding sensitive period biology in primary sensory cortices, but relatively little is known about sensitive period biology in associative neocortex. One possible mediator is the onset of puberty, which marks the transition to adolescence, when animals shift their behavior toward gaining independence and exploring their social world. Puberty onset correlates with reduced behavioral plasticity in some domains and enhanced plasticity in others, and therefore may drive the transition from juvenile to adolescent brain function. Pubertal onset is also occurring earlier in developed nations, particularly in unserved populations, and earlier puberty is associated with vulnerability for substance use, depression and anxiety. In the present article we review the evidence that supports a causal role for puberty in developmental changes in the function and neurobiology of the associative neocortex. We also propose a model for how pubertal hormones may regulate sensitive period plasticity in associative neocortex. We conclude that the evidence suggests puberty onset may play a causal role in some aspects of associative neocortical development, but that further research that manipulates puberty and measures gonadal hormones is required. We argue that further work of this kind is urgently needed to determine how earlier puberty may negatively impact human health and learning potential.

David J. Piekarski, Carolyn Johnson, Josiah R. Boivin, A. Wren Thomas, Wan Chen Lin, Kristen Delevich, Ezequiel Galarce and Linda Wilbrecht, Does puberty mark a transition in sensitive periods for plasticity in the associative neocortex?, Brain Research, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2016.08.042

Does puberty mark a transition in sensitive periods for plasticity in the associative neocortex?2016-09-03T06:57:13+00:00