Collaborative Research: RUI: The Neural Basis of Becoming a Parent: From Genotype to Phenotype

合作研究：RUI：成为父母的神经基础：从基因型到表型

• 批准号: 1455957
• 负责人: Rae Silver
• 金额: $ 56万
• 依托单位: Barnard College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2019-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1455957&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; RUI; Neural; Basis

Important changes in behavior occur with the transition to parenthood. For animals that exhibit parental care, raising offspring successfully involves transitioning from aggressive and sexual behaviors to more caring and nurturing ones. However, it is not clear how the brain brings about this transition. In a rapidly changing world, understanding how the environment affects the brain and how the brain affects the behavioral transition into parental care will shed light on how changes in environment can ultimately affect how all organisms reproduce. In an interdisciplinary collaboration between Drs. Calisi-Rodríguez and MacManes they will characterize changes in gene expression and specific protein levels in important tissues essential for reproduction, namely the hypothalamus, pituitary, and gonads, in the rock dove (Columba livia) during the transition into parental care behaviors. Like most birds, rock doves incubate eggs, but are also unique in that they "lactate" to feed their young, showing stereotypical avian and mammalian parental behaviors. This makes doves a potentially powerful theoretical bridge to understand the neurobiology of transitions into parenting. Drs. Calisi-Rodríguez and MacManes will generate a large genomic dataset and identify critical genes involved in important stages of parental care. The results will have broad potential applications including the management of captive breeding for conservation or agricultural purposes, and to inform the study of neural deficiencies in parent-offspring bonding. In addition, the researchers will develop and host an annual summer program, "Summer City Science", to expose high school students from low-income neighborhoods and underrepresented backgrounds who excel in the sciences to a range of scientific fields. This will provide students the opportunity to work closely and personally with faculty, and their research and labs. Students in both the Calisi-Rodríguez and MacManes labs will help to serve as mentors and instructors for Summer City Science to increase the scope of the training of all parties involved. The overall wider objective of this program is to broaden participation in science, creating a more efficient and diverse workforce.Previous research has implicated specific hormones that play a role in the maintenance of parental care behavior in vertebrates, including oxytocin and vasopressin (avian homologs: mesotocin and vasotocin), vasoactive intestinal peptide, and prolactin. However, very little is known about when and how the brain transitions into parental care behavior in any vertebrate, and this knowledge is fundamentally important to understand the mechanisms that mediate parental care. The Principal Investigator, during her tenure as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, discovered that the hypothalamic neurohormone, gonadotropin inhibitory hormone (GnIH), caused significant changes in abundance of GnIH containing cells in both birds and mammals during the transition to parental care. Here, the researchers propose to expand this knowledge using classic offspring removal and replacement manipulations to uncover the role of GnIH during the transition to parental care behavior. In addition to this targeted approach, they propose a powerful untargeted approach to explore what other changes in the brain may be occurring during this transition. They will use high-throughput sequencing technology and immunohistochemistry to uncover all genetic and specific proteomic changes in the brain, along with their relationship to GnIH, which occur during the transition to parental care. This project will build on previous work, and the data gathered will yield the most complete characterization and understanding of changes in neural transcription and translation reported to date in any vertebrate during the transition to parental care. All data and computer code will be made publicly available in established repositories and shared with the scientific community.

随着为人父母的过渡，行为发生了重要变化。对于表现出父母关爱的动物来说，成功抚养后代需要从攻击性和性行为转变为更加关爱和养育的行为。然而，尚不清楚大脑如何实现这种转变。在一个快速变化的世界中，了解环境如何影响大脑以及大脑如何影响向父母照顾的行为转变将揭示环境的变化如何最终影响所有生物体的繁殖方式。在博士之间的跨学科合作中。 Calisi-Rodríguez 和 MacManes 将描述岩鸠 (Columba livia) 在过渡到亲代照顾行为期间，繁殖所必需的重要组织（即下丘脑、垂体和性腺）中基因表达和特定蛋白质水平的变化。和大多数鸟类一样，岩鸠也孵蛋，但它们的独特之处在于它们会“分泌乳汁”来喂养幼崽，表现出典型的鸟类和哺乳动物父母行为。这使得鸽子成为理解向育儿过渡的神经生物学的潜在强大理论桥梁。博士。 Calisi-Rodríguez 和 MacManes 将生成一个大型基因组数据集，并识别涉及父母护理重要阶段的关键基因。研究结果将具有广泛的潜在应用，包括出于保护或农业目的的圈养繁殖管理，并为亲子关系神经缺陷的研究提供信息。此外，研究人员还将开发并举办一年一度的夏季项目“夏季城市科学”，让来自低收入社区和弱势群体、在科学领域表现出色的高中生接触到一系列科学领域。这将为学生提供与教师及其研究和实验室密切、个人合作的机会。卡利西-罗德里格斯和麦克马内斯实验室的学生将帮助担任夏季城市科学的导师和讲师，以扩大所有相关方的培训范围。该计划的总体更广泛目标是扩大对科学的参与，创造更高效、更多样化的劳动力队伍。先前的研究表明，特定激素在维持脊椎动物的亲代照顾行为中发挥作用，包括催产素和加压素（鸟类同源物：中产素和加压素）、血管活性肠肽和催乳素。然而，我们对脊椎动物的大脑何时以及如何转变为亲代照顾行为知之甚少，而这些知识对于理解介导亲代照顾的机制至关重要。首席研究员在担任 NSF 博士后研究员期间发现，在向父母照顾的过渡过程中，下丘脑神经激素、促性腺激素抑制激素 (GnIH) 会导致鸟类和哺乳动物中含有 GnIH 的细胞丰度发生显着变化。在这里，研究人员建议使用经典的后代去除和替换操作来扩展这一知识，以揭示 GnIH 在向父母照顾行为过渡期间的作用。除了这种有针对性的方法之外，他们还提出了一种强大的非针对性方法来探索在这一转变过程中大脑可能发生的其他变化。他们将使用高通量测序技术和免疫组织化学来揭示大脑中所有遗传和特定蛋白质组的变化，以及它们与 GnIH 的关系，这些变化发生在向父母照顾的过渡过程中。该项目将建立在之前的工作基础上，收集的数据将产生对迄今为止报告的任何脊椎动物在向父母照顾过渡期间神经转录和翻译变化的最完整的表征和理解。所有数据和计算机代码将在已建立的存储库中公开提供，并与科学界共享。