MIRA: The biological basis of paternal care in stickleback fish

在此输入文本，它是应用程序的新摘要信息。此部分不得超过30行文本。 摘要不变。 父母的照顾对父母和后代的健康至关重要，但人们对大脑区域和神经元回路中分子底物如何改变父母行为知之甚少，而这种差距对于父亲的照顾，即父亲的照顾行为尤其广泛。这项拟议中的研究利用了单一物种（三棘鱼）中父亲照顾的自然变化，以揭示脊椎动物父亲照顾的生物学基础。目前的父亲照顾模式有双亲照顾，这使得很难理清母亲和父亲的行为。三棘鱼是一种很有前途的父亲照顾新模式，因为父亲只负责提供照顾。此外，与护理相关的分子机制在脊椎动物中非常保守，棘鱼基因组小而紧凑，并且有越来越多的功能工具可用于研究它们。这项建议的目标是确定负责在一个单一的物种内的父亲照顾的差异的分子元素，并表征参与这种行为的变化的神经生物学途径。有两个目标：1）识别导致父亲照顾差异的基因并测试其功能; 2）定义神经肽信号调节父亲照顾的方式。该项目结合了大量和单细胞水平的脑基因表达谱，病毒介导的转基因实验，以建立催产素和精氨酸加压素信号传导的机制和药理学操作。拟议的工作提供了一个创新的解决方案，解剖的挑战，父亲照顾的生物学基础，通过使用一个强大的新模型的父亲，并利用自然变异的父亲照顾在一个单一的物种。

Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This section must be no longer than 30 lines of text. The Abstract is unchanged. Parental care is critical to the health of both parents and offspring, yet little is known about how molecular substrates act within brain areas and neuronal circuits to alter parental behavior, and this gap is especially wide for paternal care, i.e. the care-giving behavior of fathers. The proposed research capitalizes on natural variation in paternal care within a single species (threespined stickleback fish) to uncover the biological basis of paternal care in vertebrates. The current models for paternal care have biparental care, which makes it difficult to disentangle the behavior of mothers and fathers. Three-spined stickleback fish are a promising new model for paternal care because fathers are solely responsible for providing care. Moreover, the molecular mechanisms related to care are deeply conserved in vertebrates, the stickleback genome is small and compact and there are a growing number of functional tools available to study them. The goals of this proposal are to define the molecular elements responsible for differences in paternal care within a single species and to characterize the neurobiological pathways involved in such variation in behavior. There are two objectives: 1) Identify genes that contribute to differences in paternal care and test their function; 2) Define the ways in which neuropeptide signaling regulates paternal care. The project combines brain gene expression profiling at the bulk and single cell level, viral mediated transgenesis experiments to establish mechanism and pharmacological manipulations of oxytocin and arginine vasopressin signaling. The proposed work offers an innovative solution to the challenge of dissecting the biological basis of paternal care by using a powerful new model for fathering, and by capitalizing on natural variation in paternal care within a single species.