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| Poster #247 Modulation of Unimodal and Multimodal Signals in the Gustatory Cortex by Posterior Piriform Cortex Photosuppression |
| Caitlin J. White & Chad L. Samuelsen University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, United States |
Flavor perception relies on the integration of gustatory and olfactory signals, a process thought to involve interactions between the chemosensory cortices. Recent findings reveal that neurons in the gustatory cortex (GC) represent odor-taste mixtures as distinct from their unimodal components, highlighting its role in processing complex chemosensory stimuli. To investigate how network dynamics influence the representation of intraoral chemosensory stimuli, we virally expressed an inhibitory opsin (AAV-CAMKII-ArchT-GFP) in excitatory neurons of the posterior piriform cortex (pPC), a multisensory region of the olfactory cortex. We recorded activity from 266 GC neurons in six behaving female rats during the intraoral delivery of two odors (isoamyl acetate; ethyl butyrate), two tastes (sucrose; citric acid), and two specific odor-taste mixtures (IAS; EBCA), with and without pPC photosuppression. Our preliminary results show that pPC photosuppression differentially impacts the representation of the two mixtures and their components. Population decoding analyses revealed that pPC photosuppression delayed the onset of classification accuracy for the isoamyl acetate-sucrose mixture and its components (0.25–0.5 seconds), whereas decoding performance for the ethyl butyrate-citric acid mixture and its components was perturbed later (0.5–1 second). A majority of GC chemoresponsive neurons exhibited at least one stimulus response significantly modulated by pPC photosuppression. Future analyses will explore whether distinct subpopulations of GC neurons contribute to the observed temporal and stimulus-specific differences in response representations. These findings suggest how interactions between chemosensory cortices may contribute to the neural representations underlying flavor perception. |