New type of brain cell can tell us when to stop eating

Neurons in the brain of mice tell them to stop eating when they have had enough food – and the sale of humans probably have the same cells we may one day manipulate them to help treat obesity.

“The biggest question we tried to answer was the brain’s senses and responds to different signals,” says Alexander Nectow at Columbia University in New York.

To learn more, he and his colleagues used a type of molecular profile to distinguish between different cell types in the brains of mice. In the dorsal raphe core – part of the brain stem linked to features, including eating, mood and sleep – they encountered cells that produce a hormone called choledystokine that helps regulate appetite.

To study what these cells feel to kick theirs into action, scientists measured their activity when Micris was about their day. “Every time the animals went on a bite to eat, the activity was up and then decayed,” says Nectow. “We are able to show that these neurons sense things like the smell and sight of food, the taste of food, the feeling of food in the gut and the neural hormones released in response to food in the gut, and gearing of this information to actually quit in the meal.

Next, the researchers used a technique called Optogenetics, which involves the engineer of the neurons so that they could be turned on and off with light. As they used light to activate them, the mice slowed down their eating. The more intense activation, the faster the animals were slowed down and then stopped.

Because the neurons sit in the brain stem, a ancestral function similar to across Greenbrates, Nectow believes we probably have them too. “Although we have confirmed it, my guess would be that people have these neurons, determined.”

The team also found that musneurons could be activated by a connection called a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) Agonist, a type of drug used for treatment names like Ozempic and Wegovy.

If these neurons have the same function in humans, we could in theory modulate them to check to eat clothes in those with obesity or even combine this approval with GLP-1-based medicines to achieve greater weight loss, Nectow says.

“Understanding the circuit that controls eating is especially important in the environment of almost ubiquitous food accessibility,” says Jeff Davies at Swansea University, UK. “The authors used an elegant method to identify important cell populations.”