NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020: Friend or foe: Neural regulation of dynamic social environments

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of life in innovative ways. Social behavior is complex, individuals must use external information from a continually changing environment in order to display appropriate behavioral responses. The external social information is then applied within the current social context. Behavioral responses are thus dependent on the situation. This response dependency must also be reflected by predictable patterns within the brain. This research aims to uncover how neural (nervous system) activity orchestrates behavior in a socially and environmentally sensitive way. This work will broaden our understanding of how fundamental social behaviors are coordinated within the brain, while also providing opportunities in research training for undergraduates and high school students of underrepresented minorities.This research utilizes the convict cichlid (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) as a study system to establish the rule of life that social behavior is facilitated by predictable interactions of brain areas within the Social Decision-Making Network, specifically those sensitive to social information and those encoding reward. The convict cichlid is ideally suited to address this hypothesis, as this species displays pair bonding and parental care, two behavioral suites which contain both aggressive and affiliative elements. Parents both provision and guard eggs, and mated pairs reinforce their bond through affiliative displays, while also guarding mates against conspecifics. How are both distinct and shared behavioral displays, occurring within and across behavioral suites, regulated within the brain? This research implements compartment analysis of temporal activity by fluorescent in situ hybridization (catFISH) to compare the neuronal response of temporally isolated social stimulus events across four comparisons, within and across behavioral suites: (1a.) parental care (brood provision vs. brood guarding) and 1b.) pair bonding (mate affiliation vs. mate guarding), and second, compares similar behavioral displays, which occur in distinct behavioral suites (similar behavioral displays). 1c.) Brood provisioning vs. mate affiliation (affiliative behavior), and (1d.) brood guarding vs. mate guarding (aggressive behavior). Finally, brain regions will be dissected out and behaviorally active neurons will be tagged and selectively retrieved using ribosomal capture (PhosphoTRAP), in order to uncover the genomic signatures of neurons active in response to each independent stimulus. Hence, through integrating neural circuitry and genomics, this work will further our understating of brain-behavior relationships. The impact of the project will be broadened by involving high school and undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in the research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.