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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Background: Social plasticity is a pervasive feature of animal behavior. Animals adjust the expression of their social
behavior to the daily changes in social life and to transitions between life-history stages, and this ability has an
impact in their Darwinian fitness. This behavioral plasticity may be achieved either by rewiring or by biochemically
switching nodes of the neural network underlying social behavior in response to perceived social information.
Independent of the proximate mechanisms, at the neuromolecular level social plasticity relies on the regulation of
gene expression, such that different neurogenomic states emerge in response to different social stimuli and the
switches between states are orchestrated by signaling pathways that interface the social environment and the
genotype. Here, we test this hypothesis by characterizing the changes in the brain profile of gene expression in
response to social odors in the Mozambique Tilapia, Oreochromis mossambicus. This species has a rich repertoire
of social behaviors during which both visual and chemical information are conveyed to conspecifics. Specifically,
dominant males increase their urination frequency during agonist encounters and during courtship to convey
chemical information reflecting their dominance status.
Results: We recorded electro-olfactograms to test the extent to which the olfactory epithelium can discriminate
between olfactory information from dominant and subordinate males as well as from pre- and post-spawning
females. We then performed a genome-scale gene expression analysis of the olfactory bulb and the olfactory
cortex homolog in order to identify the neuromolecular systems involved in processing these social stimuli.
Conclusions: Our results show that different olfactory stimuli from conspecifics’ have a major impact in the brain
transcriptome, with different chemical social cues eliciting specific patterns of gene expression in the brain. These
results confirm the role of rapid changes in gene expression in the brain as a genomic mechanism underlying
behavioral plasticity and reinforce the idea of an extensive transcriptional plasticity of cichlid genomes, especially in
response to rapid changes in their social environment.
Description
Keywords
Cichlid Olfaction Olfactory bulb Telencephalon Microarray Transcriptomics
Citation
BMC Genomics, 16, Article 114, doi: 10.1186/s12864-015-1255-4
Publisher
BioMed Central