Valance and the Insular Cortex

The identification of a novel source of food as such and the recognition of a familiar source of food along with retrieval of its “safe” or “hazardous” labels is essential for the survival of all species, and is therefore evolutionarily conserved. As such, taste-related learning and memory paradigms are highly robust. The cortical gustatory region resides within the anterior part of the insular cortex and thus we aim to dissect out the role of the insular cortex in taste learning and interactions with other brain structures. However, the insular cortex is involved not only in taste information but in many other functions (Koren et al., under revisions). Using two-photon calcium imaging of defined gustatory cortex neurons in vivo, we have recently shown that conditioned taste aversion dynamically shifts neuronal population coding by recruiting neurons that project to the basolateral amygdala and later showed these connections are necessary and sufficient for aversive memory learning and retrieval. Recently we study the different functions of different interneurons in the insula and aim to put our molecular data into the context of specific cellular and circuit.

References:

Insular cortex neurons encode and retrieve specific immune responses. Tamar Koren, Re’ee Yifa, Mariam Amer, Maria Krot, Nadia Boshnak ,Tamar L. Ben-Shaanan, Hilla Azulay-Debby, Itay Zalayat, Eden Avishai, Haitham Hajjo, Maya Schiller, Hedva Haykin Ben Korin, Dorit Farfara, Fahed Hakim, Oren Kobiler, Kobi Rosenblum, Asya Rolls.  Published: November 08, 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.10.013

Parvalbumin interneuron inhibition onto anterior insula neurons projecting to the basolateral amygdala orchestrates aversive taste memory retrieval Adonis Yiannakas, Sailendrakumar Kolatt Chandran, Haneen Kayyal, Nathaniel Gould, Mohammad Khamaisy, Kobi Rosenblum. bioRxiv 2021.03.01.433377; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.01.433377

Activity of Insula to Basolateral Amygdala Projecting Neurons Underlies Taste Valence Encoding (2019). Haneen Kayyal, Adonis Yiannakas, Sailendrakumar Kolatt Chandran, Mohammad Khamaisy, Vijendra Sharma, and Kobi Rosenblum. J Neurosci. 2019 Nov 20;39(47):9369-9382. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0752-19.2019. 

Lavi K, Jacobson GA, Rosenblum K, Lüthi A (2018). Encoding of Conditioned Taste Aversion in Cortico-Amygdala Circuits. Cell Rep. 24(2):278-283.

Yiannakas A, Rosenblum K (2017). The Insula and Taste Learning. Front Mol Neurosci.  3;10:335. doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2017.00335. eCollection 2017.

Adaikkan C and Rosenblum K (2015).  A molecular mechanism underlying gustatory memory trace for an association in the insular cortex.  eLife 2015;10.7554/eLife.07582.

Elkobi A, Ehrlich I, Belelovsky K, Barki-Harrington L, and Rosenblum K (2008). ERK- dependent PSD-95 induction in the gustatory cortex is necessary for taste learning but not retrieval. Nature Neuroscience. 2008 Oct;11(10):1149-51.