Collaborative Research: Evolutionary lability and adaptive plasticity in physiological and molecular mechanisms of behavior

基因塑造了个体在发育过程中对环境条件的敏感程度，这种环境敏感性影响了成年后的行为。该项目旨在了解基因和发育条件如何共同影响大脑，以及如何改变社会行为。这项计划中的研究利用了大量关于遗传和环境对孔雀鱼行为影响的信息，孔雀鱼是一种小鱼，已经进化出许多对捕食者的行为反应。在野外经历高水平和低水平捕食的孔雀鱼将在实验室条件下饲养，在发育过程中有或没有捕食者暴露。遗传和分子实验将把不同大脑区域的基因表达模式与神经活动模式以及由此产生的社会行为联系起来。研究结果将表明，在何种程度上类似的行为特征（增加社会性的鱼类从高捕食网站和鱼类暴露于捕食者）依赖于相同的基因表达变化和大脑活动模式，或是否类似的行为可能会出现从各种神经机制。这些发现还将揭示对环境条件的敏感性如何影响行为的进化。开发这种新的实验方法将为其他研究人员提供一个模型，以了解基因表达差异对行为的影响。PI将把这项研究纳入本科课程，并将通过基因表达数据分析年度研讨会培训研究生。孔雀鱼的简单性和可用性也使它们能够丰富K-12课程的进化和行为，通过开发一个孔雀鱼模块，用于教学进化的理解进化资源（http：//evolution.berkeley.edu/）。该项目将允许科罗拉多州立大学的研究人员扩展一个正在进行的项目，在该项目中，实验室人员与中学班级合作，设计和实施使用孔雀鱼的行为实验，以接触更大的学生群体。

Genes shape how sensitive individuals are to environmental conditions during development, and this environmental sensitivity influences the behaviors produced in adulthood. This project seeks to understand how genes and developmental conditions together influence the brain, and how that alters social behaviors. The planned research takes advantage of extensive information on genetic and environmental influences on behavior of guppies, small fish that have evolved numerous behavioral responses to predators. Guppies that experience high and low levels of predation in the wild will be raised in laboratory conditions with and without predator exposure during development. Genetic and molecular experiments will link the patterns of gene expression in different brain regions to neural activity patterns and the resulting social behaviors. Results will demonstrate the extent to which similar behavioral traits (increased sociality in fish from high-predation sites and in fish exposed to predators) rely on the same gene expression changes and brain activity patterns, or whether similar behaviors may emerge from a variety of neural mechanisms. These findings will also reveal how sensitivity to environmental conditions shapes evolution of behavior. Developing this novel experimental approach will provide a model for other researchers seeking to understand the impacts of gene expression differences on behavior. The PIs will incorporate this research into undergraduate courses and will train graduate students via annual workshops on analysis of gene expression data. The simplicity and availability of guppies also make them amenable to enriching K-12 curricula in evolution and behavior, through development of a guppy module for for the Understanding Evolution resources for teaching evolution (http://evolution.berkeley.edu/). This project will allow the Colorado State University researchers to extend an ongoing program in which lab personnel work with middle school classes to design and implement behavioral experiments using guppies to reach a larger group of students.