Project description:Feeding is an important activity for all animals providing nutrients essential for survival and reproduction. Not surprisingly, learning plays a critical role in feeding behavior through the establishment and strengthening of food preferences and aversions. That is, the integration of taste and post ingestive visceral signals in the brain results in memorial representations about the consequences associated with ingesting a particular food. For example, when ingestion of a food is followed by negative gastrointestinal consequences (e.g. nausea, sickness, or vomiting), the animal develops a conditioned taste aversion (CTA), which produces a switch from acceptance to avoidance of that and any like tasting stimulus. Despite recent advances in understanding CTA responsive intracellular signaling pathways in the amygdala, little is known about any long-term regulation of target gene expression following CTA memory consolidation and retrieval. The present study utilized oligo-nucleotide microarray to understand the genes and networks involved in Conditional Taste Aversion Behavior.