[00:00:05]
>> Thank you and thank you for having me here one of the fun things about starting a job at Emory is that it is in Atlanta which has this really rich scientific community at multiple college and so it's it's fun to get to be here so thank you again for having me so I am going to tell you about evolutionary conservation of a social sub circuit in the brain that promotes sociality So we see and extraordinary amount of diversity in social behavior certainly across species you've got some species that are sorry too far away from the Mike we've got some species that are incredibly social They live in large groups often in groups of hundreds or more and then you can kind of think of sociality as a continuum such that what you've got from those really social species you can make your way down and have some moderately social species all the way to the other end where you've got animals that are extremely territorial or antisocial but even within a species there's often a great deal of individual variation in social behavior phenotype So I'm interested in the mechanisms that underlie social behavior and also about that variation in social phenotype arises so one of the big questions that my research addresses is how does the brain evolve to produce variation in social phenotype such that we can get 2 species of closely related birds like the zebra French and the bio dad wax bill so both of these species are still the finches they both exhibit social monogamy so they both are forming pair bonds with one mate they're all so similar when it comes to their parental care it's that they're both by parental both mothers and fathers take care of the gun but how they differ in their social structure is their grouping preferences so the her French is extremely social and gregarious whereas the wax bills are extremely territorial and they don't really like anybody except maybe sometimes they're pair on partner.

[00:02:03]
So if we can understand what in the brain underlies pro-social behavior in both of these species with different phenotypes then we might be able to get an idea of some mechanisms that may be fundamental to promoting pro-social behavior across species so it kind of sounds like I'm coming in and out what is the easier if I.

[00:02:26]
One moment it's. About that better maybe going all in turn this way Ok so. So are pushing the frontier Another question is do relevant neural mechanisms evolve in predictable ways when phenotypic convergence is seen in behavior so here we're looking again at 2 species of a stroll the finches and golem blue wax builds and zebra finch is and they have both independently of volved a more phenotype So the question here is how do the same neural mechanisms evolved to promote this similar gregarious phenotype or have they achieved a similar behavioral in point via different modifications to the brain.

[00:03:14]
So to answer these questions I use a comparative approach with a goal of identifying a mechanistic baseline of social behavior that may be present in all species so throughout my talk we'll see that there are some strongly considered features of the social brain and so we'll see similar mechanisms that promote social behavior across several different species however every animal in every species is going to face unique pressures that they have to respond to whether they're environmental or social and not surprisingly animals typically respond to these challenges in different ways which can push them away from that central tendency and result in deviations from that mean so what's important here then is to add as much biodiversity as we can to our studies the more species we study the more likely we're going to be able to identify a mechanistic baseline that may be fundamental for social behavior in all species.

[00:04:13]
So I'm going to talk a lot about social behavior as you might guess social behavior is an umbrella term it can mean a lot of different things technically aggression is a type of social behavior so there's one social behavior in particular that I'm going to be talking a lot about which is sociality So to give you an operational definition of how I'm using that sociality is a general tendency to affiliate that is not directly related to reproduction so I see sociology as a continuum such that we're going to have some species that are more social than others and even within a species some individuals that are more social and even within an individual there are certain contexts when an animal is only going to be so motivated to interact with another animal when they're not driven by the motivation to mate so we'll see that there are some similar mechanisms that underlie reproductive social behavior as well as non-reproductive sociality and.

[00:05:09]
Sorry distracting myself with the cutting in and out and so we always see that there are some overlapping mechanisms I still think it's really important to disentangle social context and to consider non-reproductive sociality as something that is distinct from reproductive behavior in a social context. Ok if we want to study social behavior in the brain what can we look at the nano peptides so many of you are likely familiar with the mammalian mana peptides base suppress and oxytocin so.

[00:05:41]
Across vertebrates except for jealous vertebrates all vertebrates are expressing some form of suppressing and oxytocin now while the nomenclature is tax on specific within a clade each of these peptides differ by only a single amino acid and because I'm going to be jumping around between different species across taxa to keep things simple I'm going to refer to all of the oxytocin forms as just oxytocin and both of those basic press and forms as just base present so for about 30 years people have been studying the involvement of the Non a pep talk is in behavior and we know that they are involved in a lot of different things from affiliation and sociality aggression dominance parental behaviors they distinguish mating systems and goals involved in stress response as well as different types of communication and learning so when I'm peptides or doing a lot of different things now while the not peptides can be found throughout the brain importantly for my studies they're found in every region of something called the social behavior network so across vertebrates there is a network of interconnected structures throughout the basal forebrain in mid brain that are fundamental for numerous social behaviors so here in this colorful diagram each of these different colored circles represents a different region of the brain in this social behavior network and you can see that they all map on and can be found throughout our vertebrate tax.

[00:07:08]
So you don't need to worry about what all these acronyms mean we are going to focus in on 2 of these in particular so a lot of my work has involved going into the brain and manipulating specific they suppress in the fetus and solve within these different brain regions and today we're going to take a look at just 2 of them which we're going to see make up a pro-social subcircuits since we'll be looking at both birds and rodents here we're looking at sagittal views of a bird brain the 1st bring region of interest is a mouthful it is the medial bag nucleus of the street terminals which I will just refer to as the b.s.t. him shown here in purple so that b.s. team is a part of the medial extended make the law and then we're also going to be looking at the lateral septum which is shown here in red so just birdbrains now we've got a coronal section here were about midway through the brain and RB s.t.m. shown in purple contains base of Presson neurons that send axonal projections throughout the brain but primarily to the lateral septum which contains they suppress and an oxytocin receptor is for that be suppressed and to bind to so I've been studying this sub circuit for a bit more than 10 years now so 1st I want to tell you about some early studies that we've done that look at the anatomy and function of this circuit so the b s t m l a space present circuit distinguishes social phenotype into strolled in finches So again we have 4 species of closely related is still the benches range selectively in their grouping behavior so again all of these birds are by parental they're all socially monogamous but some of them are extremely gregarious and highly social like the zebra French and they've become progressively less social as we make our way down to that territorial biology whack still.

[00:09:06]
Now if you take a look in the brain and look at the number of suppressing neurons in the b s t m and densities of those known accepted receptors we see that our more social species have more of a suppressive neurons in the b s t m and more peptide receptors in the lateral septum suggesting that these neurons may be involved in promoting the gregarious phenotype we see more of them in the more social species and fewer of them in the less social species another study of anatomy is looking at courtship behavior so reproductive social behavior and zebra finch is so zebra finch males much like human males some of them are excellent cording individuals and others are not so great at it so we refer to these as dogs and stunts.

[00:09:55]
So the males that are really good at courting females are studs have significantly more neurons in the study group so here we're just looking at the number of they suppress the neurons in the bee s.t.m. the quarters that are really good they have a lot of these neurons compared to the males that don't have many suggesting that Ok so this may be involved in promoting not only gregariousness but also courtship behavior so if we then take a look at the other end of that circuit the lateral septum if you infuse they suppress than into the lateral septum you see a decrease in aggression and then if you were to go in and block basin or great suppressing receptors in the lateral septum then you see a decreasing gregariousness So this suggests that that lateral septum also has properties that are promoting the presidential behavior while also decreasing aggression.

[00:10:53]
Now this is suggestive that that may be coming from base of press and originating the guest t.m. but it's not a guarantee because the lateral septum can receive a suppressant from a lot of different subgroups in the brain so from studies like this we don't know yet for certain that that base person binding is due to the b.s. team based approach the neurons so a lot of the earlier work that they did based on limitations in technology and especially technology and birds because the viruses just don't work so well if you want to go viral Dr manipulations of birds.

[00:11:31]
Only allowed us to look at one part of the circuit at a time and so that's something that I'll touch on later in the talk Ok. So now we've taken a look at some anatomical findings what about function of that base presence. So we can ask about functional questions using something called the media early genes and so we can use these immediate really genes to examine neural activity and so the eye e.g. that we use in particular is called fots and it serves as an indirect marker of neural activity so if we take a look at our photo micrograph here we have a base suppress the neuron labeled in green and that Fosse protein in red and so we can see that our base suppressing neuron is expressing fonts in its nucleus meaning that this neuron has recently responded to something.

[00:12:23]
So what you can do is you could take me if I could stand in this room all by myself nice and quiet think about life and then have everybody suddenly appear and if you look at my brain 90 minutes later neurons that are showing Fost in the nucleus our neurons that have presumably responded to you are 7 appearance so this is something that you can easily take into the lab not all of you guys too exposed to birds but for other conditions to get an idea of what these neurons are responding to.

[00:12:50]
So what studies like this we've shown that our the s.t.m. base press and some group is responding specifically to positive social stimuli so what we did was we took male and female super finches we put them in a control cage or just an empty cage or we expose them to a novel same sex concept sick sorry keep going in and out here on our y. axis here we have the percentage of neurons in the bee s.t.m. that works pressing Fos So these are the neurons that are active and you can see that for males and females these neurons are lighting up more when they're exposed to a social stimuli.

[00:13:36]
But how do we know that it's positive social stimuli I mean they really like social interactions so how do we know that that's different from you know positive social stimuli so we took it a step further and this time we exposed our birds to momentary problem some time Ok never mind.

[00:13:57]
So we exposed our birds either to that control into a cage to a water bath which they love and so we had deprived them of open water to bathe in so as soon as they had been deprived for a while and you give them a water bath I mean they literally just like dive in and start washing around they really like water or we expose them to that female and you can see that these neurons are again they're significantly lighting up more specifically to the positive social context so they're not just lighting up.

[00:14:31]
That is light enough to positive so it's just something unique about this prophecy social components. The cell group responding to positive social stimuli. To really kind of hammer this point home we can take that related species the African spill which is highly territorial so because they're territorial we can presume that a same sex const Pacific's if you expose a male to another male that is presumably going to be a negative social stimuli they mediately fight they don't like each other however if you expose them to their Paragon partner that would presumably be a positive social thing and so with that with the bills expose them to the empty cage to a male or to a female and we see that this group actually decreases activity in response to that negative social stimulus but increases activity in response to the positive social standing.

[00:15:34]
So critical that we can see some conserved functions across species here however what I've shown you about this subcircuits so far has been in director correlational and I wanted to really hone in on the direct functions of this group and so we needed to establish causation so I wanted to know what are the direct contributions of the b s t m based preference or group to behavior so to do this we used Nope not yet so based on those previous studies.

[00:16:10]
Suppressing the circuitry of the b.s.t. m.l.s. is promoting male female affiliation while also suppressing aggression and so on I hypothesize this because they need to be able to behave appropriately in a reproductive context it's not going to be very thought going to be the best interest of a male to go court a female and immediately start beating her up so to have a circuit in the brain it's going to be at the same time suppressing that aggression to allow him produce more pro-social behavior could make a lot of sense.

[00:16:43]
Ok so it's tough this we needed to directly manipulate the b.s.t. and they suppress and so Group which we did you seen they suppress an offense all the good nucleotides So any sense allows us to block translation of m.r. anything into actual peptide allowing us to cite specifically knocked down production of a suppressing So in our picture here of a little deeper French that caps a king out of its head it is a Kenyan law which if we return to our Atlas here of a birdbrain this black circle on top or presents that Kenya and then the 2 black lines dropping down into the brain are the 2 stainless steel Kenya problems that can be situated above your target of interest so for us we had them drop just above the b.s. t.m. and then every 12 hours you can go and infuse this into things and it's going to continually knock down production of base Presson So there's just fewer precedence on fair releasing peptide Now the control for this is a scrambled all the go which is literally just scrambling the gene sequence that it doesn't bind to anything so we take males and females they receive either the president or a control and then we put them in Colony observations and so in a colony we've got males and females they get little nest Cubs nesting material food and water and they get to hang out and kind of establish their own little birdie society over the course of a week and then we go in and we do spot sampling morning and evening of every day so that we can obtain measurements of things like aggression courtship pair bonding behavior general maintenance behaviors like grooming and feeding is well as nesting behaviors so from these calming observations 1st we take a look at aggression.

[00:18:34]
On our way axis here we have the number of aggressive behaviors directed toward same sex individuals and in green we can see that our males that receive the antisense and had this knockdown were substantially and significantly more aggressive than males that received the control or females that received the control or the antisense suggesting that at least in male zebra finch is that natural and dodginess peptide in this brain region is indeed important for suppression aggression such that when you knock it down they become more aggressive.

[00:19:09]
Similarly when we took a look at courtship behavior so here we've got the number of male directed songs to females and so when they when they court females that if anybody's ever watched a deeper French they kind of like dance back and back and forth on the perch and sing their little thong and so the males that have the subgroups knock down some significantly fewer of these songs to females so this is mirroring that anatomical data that I had talked about that showed that the does have fewer neurons here basically we made a dead by.

[00:19:38]
Going in and pharmacologically knocking down the cell population. So from this study we can conclude the b.s.t. and they suppress and circuitry does indeed serve to promote male female affiliation while concomitantly offsetting male aggression and that's important in this species given that males do tend to be more aggressive than females so we can see that this circuitry is involved in promoting reproductive social behavior but I still wanted to know if it was involved in promoting that non-reproductive sociality So again I took male and female is and they either got the antisense to knock down the subgroup or they got the control and this time I tested them in a group size choice paradigm so this allowed me to get measurements of social contact or general affiliation and gregariousness which is a preference to affiliate with a large group.

[00:20:36]
So to do this you place your subject in a cage containing 7 perches that contains a cage of 10 same sex concerts if it's on one side 2 on the other the total amount of time spent on those 2 in purchase combined yields a measure of social contact or general affiliation and then the percentage of that social contact time spent specifically with the large group yields a measure of could carry this with your normal neighbor French that's unmanipulated baby usually don't I mean they're not just hanging out on that and purge they're usually like cleaning up on the side of the cage their extreme Lee social trying to get as close as they can to the other birds in their busy singing through the wires that each other however when you knock down the b.s.p. invasive presence a group we find that in males but not females that we see a decreasing gregariousness So on our waxes here we have your greatness and this is post testing minus pre antisense testing so that we could account for individual differences in behavior and we can see that our males that have the antecedents and have the subgroup knocked down are spending significantly less time next to that large group compared to the Rambler males so again earlier in those 1st studies that we had done about 567 years prior to this study and were just looking at the neuroanatomy across species we see that you know this the circuitry anatomically is nearing their social phenotype and now we actually have direct evidence showing that yes these neurons are indeed promoting that gregarious behavior.

[00:22:12]
What's cool is that when you do this in a different species that is moderately social You see a really similar effect and so when we knock down the b.s.t. invasive presence a group and goal and LULAC spills we actually didn't see any influences on gregariousness but we did see a reduction in social contact and again significantly more strongly in males than females so again here male social contact and males that had this subgroup knockdown were spending more time by themselves in the middle of the cage as opposed to the males which were spending about equal amounts of time next to both the large and small groups so these experiments show us that there are similar mechanisms that have evolved to produce a similar social phenotype and it's not exactly the same we did see that this cell group aspects of social behavior bit differently that it seems to be directly from Odeon gregariousness in one species and just general affiliation in the other However I still think it's pretty cool that it shows that this group is exhibiting some conserved social functions across species and we can also conclude that those male specific effects may reflect an evolutionary co-option of circuitry that initially evolved for male specific reproductive purposes so in these species the females don't court the males it's the males courting the females and so in those early nonsocial not very a species they still needed to exhibit this courtship behavior which is why we would see similar functions in the antisocial and how the social species but then that highly social species why reinvent the wheel to create a new mechanism to promote a different type of personal behavior when you could take advantage of circuitry that are getting this Ok so these studies tell us about a fundamental mechanism that promotes pro-social behavior in birds then I wanted to know are these mechanisms of sociality conserved the cross taxa.

[00:24:16]
So interior the prairie vole approvals are socially monogamous they're much like those species of birds that we were looking at they're forming these male female pair bonds and they also exhibit by parental care they are found throughout the Midwest of the u.s. well into Canada which makes them a lot easier to go into the field to catch them all those African wax bills we had to go to Africa to catch them so having a species that's local to the states makes life a little bit easier so pretty bowls have been famously contrasted with Meadow bowls many of you have likely heard this story before our meadow bowls their promiscuous such that males mate with females and take off.

[00:24:59]
They're also not by parental males don't stick around to take care the offspring of others are the ones that raise the pups whereas in our parables there are socially monogamous and by parental So there were some really beautiful classic studies conducted by labs of seed Carter and Larry Young in the ninety's showing that Nona peptide receptor anatomy distinguishes these different systems and somewhere along the way because prey voles are socially monogamous and form pair bonds and we like to study them for love they've acquired this label of being highly social whereas the promiscuous metal bowls have acquired the label of being territorial However just because an animal doesn't form a pair bond or just because an animal doesn't take care of their offspring doesn't necessarily mean that they are territorial and so we have to be careful about how we define social behavior which is sometimes something that gets lost perhaps in the salesmanship that's required to get grants when you're trying to sell your study system.

[00:26:00]
What's great about the bowl system for both prayer bowls and metals is that there is a really rich natural history study of studies on their behavioral ecology so we know a lot about what these different species are doing in the wild so I dug into about literature and when we specifically distinguish mating system social behavior from grouping behavior we see that our female meadow bowls are indeed aggressive in the summer but they're actually quite gregarious and live in groups in the winter and males are actually gregarious year round whereas our prairie voles are indeed gregariousness gregarious that's gregarious with their Paragon partners and related kin but they're actually intensely aggressive with novel individuals So again something you know I didn't come in here and immediately start brawling with you guys I did.

[00:26:57]
Not something you would call highly social So the préval I would argue is more moderately social not highly social they're sociology is very context dependent Ok so flash back to earlier in this talk where we saw that anatomy of the circuit reflects social phenotype I wanted to know if these species of voles that same pattern and when we do distinguish between grouping behavior and mating system we do see that they are showing the same pattern so are more social species social with novel Constance if it's not reproductive context the French and the medical they do both have more.

[00:27:38]
Pressing neurons and more receptors in the lot of them compared to the less social species so this again suggests that Ok great so maybe this isn't just the fundamental mechanism for the birds I've looked at but there seems to be some conservation going across Texas. It's also a good lesson to always consider the behavioral ecology of the organism that you're studying if there is information about what this animals do you know in the wild that's always a good thing to have because what they do in the wild may be very different from what they're even allowed to do in the lab just based on living situations and it's also a reminder that we just need to be careful when we define the terms we're using to describe anything and certainly for behavior and something is as broad as social behavior Ok so none of peptide anatomy seems to be conserved across Texas but what about function so are these neurons responding to social stimuli in the voles in a similar way as they do in the birds.

[00:28:43]
So again we can return to our immediately Gene studies and find out what these neurons are responding to and go back quicker through this since you have at least seen this sort of study before. So much like we had exposed the birds to a water bath cage or a novel concept Sipek we can do something similar with the bowls However bowls are much more anxious than a bird you need to give them time to acclimate to any kind of testing cage so far and immediately genes study with bulls they hang out for about a half hour and then you can expose them to either that empty cage to something that they really like which is nonsocial which is a wooden block that they love chewing on or to their same sex sibling and so because Incredible is not super duper social in the fight a novel concept Sipek an order to find out if it's me pro-social behavior we chose a social stimulus that we know is going to be positive to them which is going to be there for milieu or cage mate simply.

[00:29:42]
And much like we saw in the birds here we've got that activity of this neuronal cell group we see that it does indeed light up specifically to the positive social context and you can't tell the difference in the activity between the empty cage and that positive would block Ok now what the parables because they're not so searchable.

[00:30:08]
I was still curious what is this cell group going to do in response to an animal that they are going to fight with. So we can see that yes it's lighting up in response to positive social stimuli but is it still promoting pro-social behavior even in a context that may have more of a negative valence to it so here this was part of a developmental study where we looked across age which not going to show you the ages basically what we did was we just exposed animals to a novel concept cystic that was same sex they certainly did fight however there is still some pro-social behavior that they exhibit and we scored their behaviors so that we can relate what is the brain doing in relation to behavior on our y. axis here we have the time spent in pro-social contact so that can involve huddling in positive social investigation like sniffing or just even kind of positive side by side contact and the more this cell group is activated the more pro-social the animal Similarly on our active here we have the time spent being aggressive and the less active this subgroup is the less aggressive the animal is.

[00:31:19]
Ok. So all of this together kind of starting to sound like a broken record up here suggests that not reproductive pro-social and anti aggressive functions of the b.s.t. invasive presence all group are highly conserved so it certainly can seem a bit redundant to be doing similar studies across species however I've been slowly building up on the side of a menagerie of animals that are all showing this concern function we've seen it in several species of birds mice chickens and now prairie Bulls so I personally think that's kind of cool that this really is suggestive that there may be central tendency that this circuit is involved in that is going to be fundamental for promoting aspects of pro-social behavior across species across taxa now.

[00:32:13]
For the last few things that I want to leave you with is something new that we're doing in my lab that is still kind of related so having worked with birds for about a decade I got really attached to trying to understand what in the brain is promoting that kind of extreme gregariousness and that sociality and while prey voles are wonderful for studying things like pair bonding or printed behavior they're not ideal for studying sociology so recently I have brought in African spiny mice to my lab and have established a breeding colony so I want to tell you a bit about these unusual little mites other than the really cute have unusually gigantic.

[00:32:54]
So spiny mice they are found throughout Africa the Middle East as well as southern Asia and what's kind of cool about them is most burdens that you think of they burrow and so spiny mice and you not dig burrows and they don't live underground so they like living in rocky outcropping and crevices this is a good thing for me because we can actually go out into the field and learn something about their behavior you hear about people going birding all the time I like burning go out there with the binoculars birds flying around they communicate the way we do with them primarily auditory and visual methods of communication so birds are pretty cool because we can look at them and have a good idea of what they're doing you can tell when a bird is really angry rodents people don't go rodent teen because rodents are typically underground there's not much to see me wandering around in a field like looking for like holes in the ground and so what's great about this species is that because they're living above ground there's a lot more information that we can get about their behavioral ecology with relative ease.

[00:33:57]
So explain mice are primarily studied because they are the only mammal noon today that can completely regenerate entire exclusive tissue this is pretty crazy they can regrow hair follicles skins what glands for cartilage the 10 fall strength of their skin is 21 times weaker than that of your average amounts so here in this picture this is what happens if you try to screw up a spine mouse so if anybody's ever worked with rodents before usually to pick them up you're going to kind of trap them on your hand and scratch them much like you would like Scruff a cat by the nape of its neck and if you do that to a spine amounts you will rip all of their skin off and then they must have crazy immune systems which nobody has yet studying because they can run around like that in the wild for $2.00 to $3.00 weeks and then they grow all their skin back and it's not scar tissue that's growing there it's the skin regenerating so pretty cool totally not my area of study but that's what people study the spine mice for you know what we do is.

[00:34:57]
So cool life. And also I apologize I've got different. Species names up here because last week we had the genome resequence and realize that we have different species that we thought we did so this is the kind of fun rollercoaster of when you work with a relatively novel animal to research is that there are only 12 labs in the world that work with these guys were the 1st to do anything social behavior and certainly social neuro science anything neuro science and just got the email from people that I've never met before and Israel saying like actually you don't have a coma sky right now if you actually have a compass to media it's a good thing we published it that aside.

[00:35:35]
All right so it's pretty nice I'm not a joiner to biologist why do I care about them so the spiny mice are unusually high in the social So from those biologists that have gone out to trap them in the wild to start their breeding colonies they've reported that they're living in groups of 20 to 50 comprised of related and unrelated individuals in the lab we can house them in cages of 20 to 30 and so you know it's a cage about this size and they're super coopt to take a random novel male 3rd in the cage and they'll just kind of like you know come on down Welcome to the huddle that doesn't happen with a lot of rodents So these guys are really highly social which is right up my alley and they're also cooperative breeders so any adults or young adult that's walking around and sees a pup will just take care of it.

[00:36:25]
There are also the 1st rodents that is known to be straight so their pets are more than one way and then also what is cool for my interest is that they're precocious and so they're Vorgna with their eyes open ears open smell they can independently locomotor as soon as they're born they can eat solid food on the 1st day of life and so if you're interested in Ok what are the early life experiences that are shaping these adult social phenotypes one could imagine that there might be some different prophecies going on an animal that can start engaging in social interactions right from the get go birth is most animals are altricial and they are completely helpless little shark bait just attached to their mother like the 1st 2 weeks of life so there are some cool there are plasticity questions that we can ask in relation to the development of the social brain.

[00:37:18]
So because of that high degree of sociality spiny mice are a much more appropriate organism for me to be using to look at what it is that makes large groups function well and what it is about you know the group phenotype involved individual phenotype that can result in that kind of peaceful coexistence in a large group.

[00:37:40]
So a little preliminary data from my beloved presence longer kind of sounding like an unhealthy obsession. On our this is not a y. axis but it kind of looks like it so over here we've got the average number of a suppress the neurons in the b s t m and then the different species that I've been looking at and we can see that our kind of less social species the more social we get the more neurons we have I was quite delighted to see a nice robust population in the spiny mice and for comparison the difference between that really territorial bird of the highly social bird so suggesting that Ok well who may be there is that conservation keeps going that central tendency really might exist in reality and not just in my head so.

[00:38:23]
That's exciting other early studies with the finding mice so no one has yet to systematically characterize their social behavior so that is what we're currently doing and then also using immediately Gene studies to find out what these neurons respond to and then we're also using viral vectors because in the sense technology's outdated.

[00:38:43]
So we've got some nice avi's and drugs that were working in them which is great so that we can go in and we can manipulate those circuits and then what's really neat is because of this dread technology for the 1st time instead of just looking at the b.s.t. and they suppress and and the lateral septum independently we can actually manipulate those direct projections at the same time.

[00:39:06]
So directed up talked about really just one little sub circuit in the brain that does show functional conservation across Texas but that's also just one circuit in the brain I'm definitely not saying that this is the only thing in the brain that promotes professional behavior absolutely not brains are incredibly complex just as social behavior is incredibly complex and so this is just but one tiny piece of the story and why I also love coming to give talks like this and to meet different scientists to find out the different sorts of approaches that they're taking in the different parts of the brain that they're looking at to understand what makes animals do what they do.

[00:39:46]
With that acknowledgement all the bird work was conducted at Indiana University the vole work the majority of it at Cornell some of it here in Marine and now the spiny mice and also a shout out to my collaborator actually see for University of Kentucky who is the regenerative biologist that I would not have the spine and I say if it weren't for his generosity and openness to help me start my own colony but that I could take any questions.

[00:40:18]
Yeah. That's. What. We're. Mostly So the number of dances that they do and the number of songs and then we also did look at what's the outcome of that is the female receptivity and so when male start doing their little band from their song The females will solicit copulation where they kind of like it's kind of like lordosis inner rodent and so the like with their tails and lean forward and so that would be certainly considered of the success of courtship Yeah.

[00:41:00]
Arms. Of the social behavior or like Christianity or. Yeah. Or. It it's all so with the increase and so it's it's kind of all overlapping so it's almost like you're altering the complete phenotype So whereas something like dreads an opto you're on the timescale of like milliseconds with octo 2 minutes an hour and with dreads and with the empty since it's more kind of like a short hair Pienaar in a where you did it's getting a constant consistent knockdown of behavior and so you're just making basically now for as long as you keep infusing this antisense every 12 hours you will have an angry bird just all the time until you stop infusing the antisense and then production starts to ramp up and then their behavior changes again then into your question a little bit.

[00:42:11]
Yes And so with before we did any of the behavioral tests with the 1st we did you know the timing of after the 1st infusion how many how many infusions do you need how many 12 hour cycles do you need until you see a ceiling effect of what's going to do it's about knocked down about 55 percent and it's after 72 hours it just seems to stabilize and so that's when we would start testing is that at least the kind of had a consistency in how their phenotype has changed but super curious with things like drugs to be able to see how quickly you can kind of go back and forth with the behaviors certainly there are some amazing opt out experiments where you know all of a sudden turn on the laser and super aggressive and I'm not certain if we'll see similarities with that here 30.

[00:42:59]
00. Or. Surprisingly not to my knowledge really so most people that are looking at the b s t m are not specifically looking at base of press in primates and they're just looking at it generally in relation to anxiety. So what's most people in rodents have found that they suppress the new c.e.o. genic.

[00:43:24]
And in the birds we've actually shown that it's ngs you know lick and so that might just be a general difference between taxa but again not so much an in humans in primates because people don't look at base press and there it's a wee wee random region of the brain but it's connected to the middle which of course everybody is interested in.

[00:43:58]
Yeah I mean it would be amazing to to look in a highly social primate which is a non-human primate would be feasible depending on the right collaboration's. Looking at other so it took me a while to search for a mammal that was highly social that sorry that I could bring into the lab that's like when you think of highly social mammals I think of on Gill It's like one of the beasts like their influx of don't call her snuff box will be a star are in gigantic herds running throughout Africa and so even you know a lot of caribou and reindeer like all these giant ungulates you see on you know the Discovery Channel during the really cool collective behavior that's coronated movements and so that type of sociology to be able to even move in Coronation like bat is different that that could be a really interesting system to look at to see if sociology and kind of large scale coordination like that are modulated Similarly one could do that to a certain extent in fish but they have slightly different in a topical morphology such that they don't really have a b.s.t. I'm containing For them it would be the citizen cells so you have to look at different populations and fish I don't know about dolphins it's a good question.

[00:45:18]
From Online no. Yes So. At 1st I was digging through the literature to try and find papers that were reporting cell numbers in a manner that was consistently collected such that you know a lot of people will take you know every 120 microns they're going to take a snapshot of the brain and count those and it started to get a bit too unreliable for my taste and so I decided to just get as many brains as I couldn't do it myself that way it was done the exact same way by the same person with the same antibodies and then yes they are absolute cell numbers so it's not that large of a cell group in the birds it's pretty big though those I mean they're just there are tons of them but even in the prairie voles like 30 neurons that's really not that many and especially in animals where they have fewer and fewer of these neurons but a small target to go in and hit with something like an 80 but yeah so absolute numbers and be a few.

[00:46:37]
Are going to try and you see me on the news. Yeah. For this for this subgroup in particular I don't think anybody's really looked at it I have looked at. Individual variation in step to a lot of peptide receptors. In in the bowls and it was. At the genetic study where probables were raised with single mothers or 2 parents.

[00:47:35]
And also some of the mothers were working so we wanted to see how trying to make working parents. So basically made the parents work for their food so anyway but you do see that based on that early rearing environment you can see big differences mostly in males so with females they had pretty stable anatomical outputs at least and you would even see methylation differences in both females and males but you only saw the change in gene expression in the males and in a couple other studies that we've done there seems to be something particularly plastic or susceptible about males and not in females and not entirely sure why that's the case that's about as much as kind of what you know others have done on the plasticity end of things.

[00:48:27]
So. That's a good question. I think of a really long periods of time when you see something that suggests that co-option circuits themselves might be evolving but maybe I mean it could be reading too much into it it just could be that in those highly social species the circuits simply need to become more plastic so they can be used for more things.

[00:48:57]
Thank you. Well. Thank. You.