The Chang lab’s research focuses on interoception - the body’s ability to sense changes within itself. The process of interoception depends on the vagus nerve, which acts as a communication line, sending signals from respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems into the brainstem. This vagal interoception system is essential for survival, but how this communication line works is unclear. Work led by Qiancheng Zhao (2018 Kavli Postdoctoral Fellowship, Chang and Young labs) describes how vagal sensory neurons code these signals with high precision.
Continued support to the Chang Lab through a Kavli Innovative Award (2019, Rui Chang and Le Zhang) enabled the development of a novel projection neuron profiling strategy, called high-throughput Single-Neuron transcriptome Analysis based on Projections (SNAP-seq). The team used large-scale single-cell profiling of vagal sensory neurons and calcium imaging-guided spatial transcriptomics to show that these cells code three dimensions of an interoceptive signal, including the visceral organ (where along the body rostral-caudal axis), the tissue layer (where along the surface-lumen axis of organs), and the stimulus modality (e.g., stretch or chemical challenges). Now an assistant professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Zhao is continuing his research on the neurobiology of interoception. More recent work led by I-Uen (Yvonne) Hsu (2021 Kavli Postdoctoral Fellowship, Chang, Young, and Zhang labs) is examining the organizational differences between the enteric nervous system and the intrinsic cardiac nervous system. Understanding these mechanisms of the heart-brain axis will pave the way to new treatment approaches, such as controlling hypertension by targeting “the little brain of the heart”.
This article is part of a special series highlighting the impact of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. The series will be published ahead of the Kavli 20th Anniversary Symposium, taking place on Friday, September 20th in TAC.