Why do we feel sick ?

During an infection, animals exhibit a highly stereotyped set of symptoms including fever, fatigue, body aches, changes to appetite, thirst and more. Sickness symptoms are an important part of the immune response and function to activate the immune system, prevent further exposure and increase survival. The goal of the Osterhout lab is to understand the mechanisms controlling sickness. Work from our lab and others demonstrates that the brain plays a key role in generating sickness symptoms, yet how the brain senses an immune response and modulates neural circuits to make us feel sick, is still unclear.  We utilize cutting-edge approaches for behavioral characterization, viral-mediated functional manipulation and single-cell gene expression analyses to better understand how sickness symptoms are controlled and the basic principles governing immune-brain communication.