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This is an ectopic seminar hosted by the Zebrafish Groupie & is open to the UO community
Abstract: Social behavior ranges from simple pairwise interactions to thousands of individuals coordinating goal-directed movements across animal species. Regardless of the scale, these interactions are governed by multimodal sensory input that requires animals to actively attend to cues and respond appropriately for the context. We leveraged the zebrafish, a highly social and experimentally tractable model organism, to study naturalistic pairwise interactions early in development. We identified stereotyped positions and coordinated movements in interacting pairs, and generated a model to automatically classify states of active interaction. We then manipulated visual and mechanosensory cues to test the contributions of these distinct sensory inputs to behavioral states and corresponding brain activity. Whole-brain immunolabeling for recently active neurons revealed neuronal populations in the forebrain and habenula are selectively active in social contexts and predict sociality of individual pairs. Altogether, we find coordinated social interactions are reliably elicited in juvenile zebrafish early in development, and that specific social behaviors rely on different sensory modalities and distinct brain circuits.
Social interactions play a major a major role in different functional domains relevant for Darwinian fitness, such as finding food, choosing mates, or avoiding predators. Therefore, at the proximate level social interactions are a key mortality risk factor with health implications and at the ultimate level, sociality impacts ecological and evolutionary processes. Our lab studies social behavior at both levels, combining the study of proximate causes (genes, hormones, neural circuits, cognitive processes) and ultimate effects (evolutionary consequences). For this purpose, we have been using two model organisms in the lab - zebrafish and fruit flies - to study the neural circuits and the genetic architecture of social behavior. In this talk, I will provide some examples of the work done in our lab in both model organisms. First, I will show how oxytocin plays a critical role in the development of sociality in zebrafish and how it interacts with the developmental environment to shape the emergence of different aspects of adult social behavior. I will then, show how oxytocin is necessary and sufficient for complex social behavior in adult zebrafish, including social contagion of fear and emotion recognition. Finally, I will address the evolvability of sociality in zebrafish illustrated by an artificial selection experiment (currently in the F7). In the second part of my talk, I will present results on a study that investigates the genetic architecture of social cognition in Drosophila. We specifically address the question of social learning being a domain-specific or a general-domain cognitive process. For this purpose, we have phenotyped social and asocial learning in the core lines of the DGRP panel. We show that there is no phenotypic correlation between the two learning types and that the GWAS revealed different genetic variants located in different genes associated with social and asocial learning. Finally, we show that most social learning-associated genes are expressed in the Drosophila mushroom bodies and functionally confirmed their involvement in learning using RNAi lines. Together these results highlight the potential of each model organism to address question related to the mechanisms underlying sociality.
Huberman Lab at Stanford
Note this seminar is scheduled in a new location and time.
Hosted by the Center for the Science and Practice of Well-Being. Learn more at www.wellbeingneuroscience.org
Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology and by courtesy, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine. He has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning.
In 2021, Dr. Huberman launched the Huberman Lab podcast. The podcast is frequently ranked in the Top 15 of all podcasts globally and is often ranked #1 in the categories of science, education, and health & fitness.
