Tatiana Korotkova

Institute for Systems Physiology

Prof. Dr. Tatiana Korotkova

Principal Investigator
Institute Director
Head of Research Area 3

+49 221 4786950

tatiana.korotkova[at]uk-koeln.de

Website

CurioNeuro

Curriculum Vitae

Research Areas

Neuronal Circuits and Behavior

Our lab studies neuronal circuits regulating different aspects of innate behaviors, including feeding behaviors, social interaction, arousal and voluntary locomotion. Our aim is to reveal and decode functions of various hypothalamic neuronal circuits in these behaviors in health, disease, and aging.

Research Focus

Neurons in the lateral hypothalamus (colored green) control feeding behavior, social interactions and exploration. The traces show the activity of individual neurons in this brain region. Copyright: Dr. A. Petzold/CECAD — Neurons in the lateral hypothalamus (colored green) control feeding behavior, social interactions and exploration. The traces show the activity of individual neurons in this brain region.

Our Neuronal Circuits and Behavior group studies neuronal circuits regulating different aspects of innate behaviors, including feeding-related behaviors, social behaviors, and voluntary locomotion, as well as learning. The overall goal of our group is to unravel functions of hypothalamic neuronal circuits related to health, disease and healthy aging.

We focus on decoding neuronal mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disorders, associated with dysfunctions of hypothalamus, including eating disorders. To reveal and decode the influence of various neuronal groups and their inputs on innate behaviors, we combine state-of-the-art technologies, including multisite high-density neuronal recordings in transgenic behaving mice; optogenetics; chemogenetics; and novel computational and engineering approaches.

We aim to identify the neuronal circuits underlying metabolic and behavioral changes across lifespan, during healthy aging, and in disease states. Our goal is to generate the knowledge that can be used to identify novel therapeutic targets for obesity, sleep and memory disorders.

Our Goals

We found that voluntary locomotion is regulated by the lateral hypothalamus (LH) (Bender et al., 2015), and that activation of LH GABA cells promotes arousal (Herrera et al., 2016); and feeding (Carus-Cadavieco et al., 2017). Further, we showed that activation of specific GABAergic neuronal subpopulation, leptin receptors-expressing neurons, in the LH switches motivation from feeding to locomotion and social interactions (Petzold et al., 2023) and promotes social interactions despite acute hunger. We also demonstrated how signaling in hippocampus regulate spatial coding (Gao et al., 2021).

We aim to understand the changes in neuronal activity in the lateral hypothalamus during aging, and how these changes underlie metabolic and sleep disorders that represent major health problems in the elderly population.
We further seek to investigate changes of neuronal circuitries involved in the regulation of innate behaviors in aging, to identify the neuronal groups and neural dynamics that underlie these changes, and to study consequences of optogenetically restored physiological signaling within hypothalamic groups.
Further, we are investigating a role of neural circuits in the translation of cognitive- and reward-related information to the hypothalamus during innate behaviors, and analyzing how this translation changes in the context of disease as well as during healthy aging.

Key Publications

Chen C*, Altafi M*, Corbu M, Trenk A, Munkhof H, Weineck K, Bender F, Carus-Cadavieco M, Bakhareva A, Korotkova T*§, Ponomarenko A*§. The dynamic state of a prefrontal-hypothalamic-midbrain circuit commands behavioral transitions. Nature Neurosci 2024 Mar 18. doi: 10.1038/s41593-024-01598-3.
Petzold A, van den Munkhof HE, Figge-Schlensok R, Korotkova T. Complementary lateral hypothalamic populations resist hunger pressure to balance nutritional and social needs (2023). Cell Metabolism 35, 1-16. Featured in Ledford H. Sex, food or water? How mice decide. Nature News, Nature. 2023 Feb 23. doi: 10.1038/d41586-023-00521-3.
Carus-Cadavieco M, Gorbati M, Ye L, Bender F, van der Veldt S, Kosse C, Börgers C, Lee SY, Ramakrishnan C, Hu Y, Denisova N, Ramm F, Volitaki E, Burdakov D, Deisseroth K, Ponomarenko A^*§, Korotkova T^*§ (2017). Gamma oscillations organize top-down signaling to hypothalamus and enable food seeking. Nature, 542(7640):232-236.
Herrera CG, Carus-Cadavieco M, Jego S, Ponomarenko A, Korotkova T, Adamantidis A (2016). Hypothalamic feed-forward inhibition of thalamocortical network controls arousal and consciousness. Nature Neuroscience, 19(2):290-8.
Bender F, Gorbati M, Carus-Cadavieco M, Denisova N, Gao X, Holman C, Korotkova T^*§, Ponomarenko A^*§ (2015). Theta oscillations regulate speed of locomotion via hippocampus to lateral septum pathway. Nature Communications, 6:8521 doi: 10.1038/ncomms9521

(*- equal contribution, § - corresponding authors).