Neural Processing of Amino Acid Taste Information

味觉涉及化学感觉刺激，这些刺激通常是复杂的混合物，而不是单一的纯物质。了解味觉系统对刺激混合物的处理是否与它们单独呈现的成分不同仍然是至关重要的。这项工作使用了鲶鱼相对简单的味觉系统，它对氨基酸刺激非常敏感，以了解有关混合物的神经信息是如何处理的。外周味觉系统中单个神经细胞的电生理学将被用来观察哪种类型的混合相互作用（抑制或增强）存在，不同的神经是否以不同的方式处理混合物，以及混合相互作用是否可以根据对混合物单个成分的反应来预测。大脑神经细胞的反应将揭示来自不同外周纤维类型的输入是如何汇聚的，以及外周和大脑对混合信息的处理是否不同。由特定氨基酸引起的特定行为，如进食，将用于确定单独通过味道进行区分的效果，以及混合物如何影响行为。这项使用这种独特模型系统的研究将对神经科学产生总体影响，通过增加我们对复杂感官信息处理方式的理解，通过与昆虫和甲壳类动物的其他模型化学感觉系统进行有用的比较，并通过对当前复杂信号的视觉和听觉分析工作提供有用的类比。它还可能对生物技术产生影响，提供有关混合物如何影响风味的有用信息，并为水产养殖中摄食行为的化学感觉调节提供潜力。

The sense of taste involves chemosensory stimuli that usually are complex mixtures rather than single pure substances. It remains critical to know whether the taste system treats stimulus mixtures differently from their individually presented components. This work uses the relatively simple taste system of the catfish, which is exquisitely sensitive to amino acid stimuli, to understand how such neural information about mixtures is processed. Electrophysiology on single nerve cells in the peripheral taste system will be used to see what types of mixture interactions (suppression or enhancement) are present, whether different nerves process a mixture differently, and whether the mixture interactions are predictable based on responses to the individual components of the mixture. Responses of nerve cells in the brain will reveal how the inputs from different peripheral fiber types converge, and whether mixture information is processed differently between periphery and brain. Specific behaviors elicited by particular amino acids, such as feeding, will be used to determine how well discrimination can be done by taste alone, and how mixtures affect behavior. This study using this unique model system will have an impact on neuroscience in general, by increasing our understanding of how complex sensory information in general is processed, by providing useful comparisons with other model chemosensory systems in insects and crustaceans, and by providing useful analogies to current work in visual and auditory analysis of complex signals. It also is likely to have an impact on biotechnology, by providing useful information on how mixtures affect flavor, and by offering the potential for chemosensory modulation of feeding behavior in aquaculture.