{"id":"doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04515-5","kind":"article","title":"A multidimensional coding architecture of the vagal interoceptive system","authors":["Zhao Q","Yu CD","Wang R","Xu QJ","Dai Pra R","Zhang L","Chang RB"],"author_count":7,"year":2022,"published":"2022-03-16","venue":"Nature","cited_by":208,"doi":"10.1038/s41586-022-04515-5","arxiv_id":null,"nct_id":null,"source_url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04515-5","archive_url":"https://space-kitty.com/papers/doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04515-5","updated":null,"pmid":"35296859","pmcid":"PMC8967724","openalex_id":null,"pdf_url":"https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC8967724/pdf","abstract":"Interoception, the ability to timely and precisely sense changes inside the body, is critical for survival 1-4 . Vagal sensory neurons (VSNs) form an important body-to-brain connection, navigating visceral organs along the rostral-caudal axis of the body and crossing the surface-lumen axis of organs into appropriate tissue layers 5,6 . The brain can discriminate numerous body signals through VSNs, but the underlying coding strategy remains poorly understood. Here we show that VSNs code visceral organ, tissue layer and stimulus modality-three key features of an interoceptive signal-in different dimensions. Large-scale single-cell profiling of VSNs from seven major organs in mice using multiplexed projection barcodes reveals a 'visceral organ' dimension composed of differentially expressed gene modules that code organs along the body's rostral-caudal axis. We discover another 'tissue layer' dimension with gene modules that code the locations of VSN endings along the surface-lumen axis of organs. Using calcium-imaging-guided spatial transcriptomics, we show that VSNs are organized into functional units to sense similar stimuli across organs and tissue layers; this constitutes a third 'stimulus modality' dimension. The three independent feature-coding dimensions together specify many parallel VSN pathways in a combinatorial manner and facilitate the complex projection of VSNs in the brainstem. Our study highlights a multidimensional coding architecture of the mammalian vagal interoceptive system for effective signal communication.","abstract_license":"CC-BY (article license as recorded by Europe PMC; abstract reproduced unmodified apart from markup removal)","license":"CC-BY","is_open_access":true,"peer_reviewed":null,"categories":[],"details":null,"provenance":"europepmc","attribution":"Abstract of \"A multidimensional coding architecture of the vagal interoceptive system\" by Zhao Q, Yu CD, Wang R et al., https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04515-5, used under its Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY); markup removed, otherwise unmodified.","topics":[{"slug":"single-cell-spatial","name":"Single-Cell & Spatial Omics","domain_slug":"biotech"}],"cited_in_dossiers":[]}