Behavioral Neuroendocrinology of Vocal Communication

类固醇激素在从发育和繁殖到认知和社会等级建立的广泛机制中发挥着强大的作用。这里提出的新研究将确定介导快速类固醇作用于神经细胞（神经元）的细胞和分子事件，这些事件直接产生行为，在这种情况下，发声对社会交流至关重要。类固醇对发声行为和神经元的发育和维持的长期影响是众所周知的，但它们的短期作用是意想不到的，基本上没有被探索过。硬骨鱼的声音控制系统是脊椎动物中枢神经系统如何产生社会性、情境依赖性发声的最基本例子。PI发现，雄激素、雌激素和皮质醇（硬骨鱼体内主要的“应激”类固醇）会引起发声神经元输出的快速变化，这种变化与类固醇对自然鸣叫行为的影响的时间过程相似。这为研究类固醇对神经元的快速作用的生理基础提供了一个模型，这种作用直接导致了社会行为的改变。神经生理学、分子学和行为学方法将用于展示类固醇如何塑造神经元功能，介导这些作用的受体位于何处，以及一种或多种类固醇如何影响发声行为。所确定的原理适用于其他脊椎动物，因为在硬骨鱼和其他类群（包括鸟类和哺乳动物）之间，声音、神经和内分泌机制在进化上是保守的。这项研究已经并将继续培养来自不同文化背景和地理区域的男女本科生、研究生和博士后，并通过出版物、新闻采访和在专业学会、大学、海洋生物实验室和当地社区科学中心的演讲，使研究成果容易为公众所接受。

Steroid hormones exert powerful effects on a wide range of mechanisms ranging from development and reproduction to cognition and the establishment of social hierarchies. The new studies proposed here will identify the cellular and molecular events that mediate rapid steroid actions on nerve cells (neurons) that directly generate behavior, in this case vocalizations that are essential for social communication. Long-term influences of steroids on the development and maintenance of vocal behaviors and neurons is well known, but their short-term actions is both unexpected and essentially unexplored. The vocal control system of teleost fish presents the most basic example of how the central nervous system of vertebrates produces social, context-dependent vocalizations. The PI has discovered that androgens, estrogen and cortisol (the major "stress" steroid in teleost fish) induce rapid changes in the output of vocal neurons that parallel the time course of steroid effects on natural calling behaviors. This now provides a model to study the physiological basis for rapid steroid effects on neurons that directly lead to changes in a social behavior. Neurophysiological, molecular and behavioral methods will be used to show how steroids shape neuronal function, where the receptors that mediate these effects are located, and how vocal behaviors are influenced by one or more steroids. The principles identified apply to other vertebrates because vocal, neural and endocrine mechanisms are evolutionarily conserved between teleosts and other groups, including birds and mammals. This research has, and will continue to, train undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students of both sexes from diverse cultural backgrounds and geographic regions and make the results of the research easily accessible to the general public through publications, press interviews and presentations at professional societies, universities, marine biology laboratories and local community science centers.