Collaborative Research: Brain Metabolic Plasticity and Agression

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This research project will address the fundamental, but complex biological phenomenon of the link between brain function and behavior. The brain is an integrated and dynamic system with regions, neuronal tracts, and cell types that show distinct responses to environmental stimuli, and these responses must be integrated to coordinate behavioral response. In this project, the mechanisms underlying aggressive behavior in honey bees will be analyzed. It is known that metabolism is integral to the aggression in honey bees, however, the consequences of the aggression-related shift in metabolism, in terms of neural and behavioral plasticity, remain unknown. The Project will combine the modeling tools of systems biology with genomic data and experimental validation to address the link between brain metabolism and behavior in the context of aggressive behavior in the honey bee. The Price Lab will construct a genome-scale metabolic network model for the honey bee, which will provide a framework to hypothesize how changes in metabolic gene expression affect metabolism in the honey bee brain. In addition, they will analyze genetic and regulatory variation between sub-species of honey bee to identify candidate regulators of brain metabolism. Identifying genetic variation in the regulators of brain metabolism may provide insight into whether natural variation in aggression is a result of heritable differences in metabolic regulation in the brain. The combined modeling and experimental aspects of this project offer a multitude of opportunities for students to take part in independent research and learn new modeling and experimental techniques.