Science Spotlight with Dr. Hillary Schiff

How does your research help us understand how sensory experiences, like tasting different food, influence brain development? 

My work and that from many others shows that early life experience with tastes and food is required for normal brain development. Now we are exploring the specific neuron types that are modified by early life taste experience—not only whether they change, but how they change. This information will help us determine their function during the sensation of a taste or while making a choice about what or how much to eat. Many other mysteries remain. I am eager to learn more about the interaction of taste and nutrition on brain development and taste preference. It may seem obvious that the foods that help you meet nutritional needs become preferred foods, but the mechanisms that allow the brain and body to communicate are not known. We are investigating how the interaction of nutrition and taste during early life contributes to brain development, taste preference, and eating behaviors like meal size control.

What impact can your research have on human health as it relates to diet-related chronic disease? 

We are taking two approaches to examine how early life experience with tastes and food affects brain development and eating behaviors. First, we are interested in how those early food experiences shape taste preference and brain development. We recently found that early taste experience not only change preference for sweet foods but also cause long-lasting changes in the cortical brain region for taste, the gustatory cortex. The same experience was not effective when given to adult rodents, suggesting that there is a restricted time window in early life when taste experience is crucial. Second, meal size is partially determined by taste and the nutritional content of the meal. We are exploring whether the control of meal size is established by early life food experiences and which neural circuitry is involved. Because our taste preferences play an outsized role in determining diet, these research questions have profound implications for nutritional health and diseases associated with eating, including eating disorders and type 2 diabetes. We are also interested in atypical neural development, such as autism, when sensory sensitivities to food can diminish quality of life and result in poor diet and oral health. Ultimately, we are trying to understand how our early experiences eating food contribute to healthy preferences and eating habits throughout life.

What innovative methodology are you using in your research?

We are taking advantage of genetic mouse lines to get at the contribution of particular subtypes of neurons in the cortical brain region for taste, the gustatory cortex, because this area is so important in decision-making and sensory processing. To isolate neuron subgroups, we are using intersectional genetic techniques in combination with new viral tools. This combinatorial approach allows us to label those neurons and monitor or manipulate their activity and connectivity patterns in vivo and in vitro. 

In another approach, we examine convergence between taste and nutrition in the brain. The combination of genetic and viral tools allows us access to small groups of neurons which respond to a particular sensory experiences like taste or the arrival of nutrients in the gut. We are using creative experimental design to separate these two processes that are so important to ingestion to ask multiple questions about their function—such as, are there neurons that respond to both taste and gut signals? 

What are the challenges related to this type of research?

We have multiple challenges—some are technical, and some are qualitative. On the technical side, we have to maintain multiple strains of genetically modified mice. This requires organization and careful monitoring. In the mouse brain, we are dealing with very small structures, so this requires a lot of training, care, precision, and coordination with our animal care staff. On the qualitative side, it can be very difficult to separate the sensory qualities of taste from the hedonic qualities which can interfere with the interpretation of results. Similarly, it is also difficult to separate taste from ingestion. We are beginning to use creative experimental techniques to do just that. We can then examine how taste and gut signals interact to influence brain activity and behavior. 

What excites you most about this research?

I have always been interested in the neural mechanisms that occur during learning and synaptic plasticity. I’m really excited to work on these concepts in the framework of ingestion because both the taste aspect and the nutritional aspect are natural and important for our survival and well-being. Taste and nutrition go together in multiple ways: taste, especially sweet taste, predicts calories, while nutrition reinforces those tastes and make them more palatable. Understanding how these associations form in the brain in response to early life experiences with food may reveal how our preferences for certain foods and tastes develop.

Who are you hoping to collaborate with at OSU? 

The breadth of researchers on campus whom I’d love to work with is truly staggering. I am hoping to establish collaborations with my colleagues in the College of Dentistry and the other neuroscientists on campus for animal work, oral biology, microscopy techniques, and monitoring neural function. Beyond my immediate field, the College of Medicine has fantastic research on brain-body connectivity that I am hoping to delve into, especially related to gut sensing of nutrients. I am also hoping to work with people in Food Science, Psychology, Engineering, and even Anthropology for aspects related to taste preference, motivation, and childhood eating behaviors.

Any closing thoughts?

Neurobiology of taste and ingestion is an interdisciplinary effort. I’m so excited to get to work with the brilliant researchers and students on OSU’s campus as well as with the Foods for Health initiative which provides such an important framework for bringing together many researchers in varied fields across campus. My lab’s primary techniques are rodent behavior combined with opto and chemogenetics, ex vivo electrophysiology, and neural circuit tracing. I’m starting a brand-new lab here and looking to hire at all levels—join me!