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The Specialized Center of Research Excellence (SCORE) on sex differences at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has a long track record studying bidirectional interactions between different organs and the brain in health and disease with a strong focus on sex as a biological variable (SABV). While the initial focus was on brain-gut interactions in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), one of the most common disorders of gut-brain interaction, the scope of our Centers research has expanded to a range of different diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, alcohol use disorder, obesity, urological chronic pelvic pain syndrome, and vulvodynia. This expansion of research focused on the role of brain-body and brain-gut microbiome interactions in these various disorders, aligning well with the increasing importance of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary team science. The SCOREs Career Enhancement Core (CEC) has modeled team science as applied to SABV research, with educational and training opportunities, a mentoring program, seed grant funding, and other career development experiences that enable mentees to work across the disciplines involved in brain body research. The CEC goals are: (1) To provide seed grant funds for innovative research relevant to the overall SCORE mission and research program; (2) to recruit and foster the career development of students, trainees, and junior investigators who conduct research focused on sex differences or womens health in IBS and chronic constipation and other brain-gut disorders; (3) to facilitate and promote collaboration between the UCLA SCORE and other academic programs involved in womens health education and research; and (4) to promote the importance of SABV through community outreach using collaborative and innovative approaches. These goals focus on establishing the leading research center in sex differences in basic, translational, and clinical aspects of brain-body interactions and on providing women and underr

The discovery of somatostatin (SST) in the hypothalamus implicated the peptide in the inhibition of growth hormone release. However, as observed for numerous neuropeptides, SST was neither restricted to this one brain site nor to this one function. Subsequent studies established a widespread but specific expression of SST in the central nervous system of rodents and humans along with the expression patterns of five receptors (sst1-5 ). Among biological actions, the activation of central SST signaling induced a robust stimulation of food and water intake, which is mediated by the sst2 as assessed using selective sst agonists. The past years have witnessed the identification of brain SST circuitries involved using chemogenetic and optogenetic approaches and further established a physiological orexigenic role of brain SST signaling. The present review will discuss these recent findings.