Overlapping representations of food and social stimuli in VTA dopamine neurons

We used 2-photon calcium imaging to determine whether the same or different dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTADA) encode food and social stimuli, and found statistically significant overlap in the populations responsive to both stimuli. Both hunger and opposite-sex social experience increased the proportion of neurons that respond to both stimuli, implying that increasing motivation for one stimulus further increases overlap. We used single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) to examine cell type-specific gene expression changes across different hunger states and the level of co-expression of feeding- and social-hormone related genes in individual VTADA neurons. VTA nuclei from C57BL/6 mice were isolated and analyzed using snRNA-seq. We analyzed nuclei from control (3 male, 3 female), hungry (1 male, 1 female), and sated (1 male, 1 female) samples.