Taste response variability and temporal coding in the nucleus of the solitary tract of the rat

Theories of taste coding in the brain stem have been based on the idea that taste responses are integrated over time without regard to the temporal structure of the taste-evoked spike train. In the present experiment, the reliability of response rate across stimulus repetitions and the potential contribution of temporal coding to the discrimination of taste stimuli was examined. Taste stimuli representing the four basic taste qualities were presented repeatedly, and electrophysiological responses were recorded from single cells in the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) of anesthetized rats. Blocks of the four tastants were repeated for as long as the cell remained isolated. Nineteen cells were recorded with between 8 and 27 repetitions of each stimulus. Response magnitude to a given tastant varied widely within some NTS cells. This impacted the determination of both the breadth of tuning and best stimulus for a given cell. The contribution of spike timing and the pattern of interspike intervals to discrimination of taste stimuli was evaluated by an information-theoretic approach based on two families of metrics. Spike timing significantly contributed to the discrimination of taste qualities in 10 of 19 (53%) cells. This contribution was especially notable during the initial 2 s of the response. Those cells that showed the most variable firing rates in response to repetition of taste stimuli tended to show the largest contribution of temporal coding. These results suggest that, in addition to response rate, the temporal parameters of responses may convey information about taste stimuli in the NTS.