Functional ontogeny of pair bonding neural circuits

项目概要/摘要 我们在成年期建立的有益的纽带，特别是我们与浪漫伴侣的配对纽带， 保护我们的大脑和行为。在社会参与和能力方面有困难的人，例如 因为那些患有社交焦虑症、重度抑郁症、多动症或自闭症谱系障碍的人， 易受社会孤立和缺乏社交网络的健康风险的影响。多巴胺能异常活动 青少年时期的奖励系统与许多这些疾病的发作相吻合，这表明发育 促进社会回报的神经基质的异常是疾病病理学的基础。关键是， 我们从对成年人大脑的研究中了解到促进配对的神经机制，突出了一个 迫切需要研究社会联系回路的功能发展，以设计更好的治疗方法 社会功能障碍。目前的提案旨在利用草原田鼠的社会一夫一妻制系统， 研究多巴胺能奖励回路的成熟变化，启动配对结合的能力， 成年草原田鼠与它们的配偶形成牢固的配对关系，这依赖于多巴胺的功能活动 系统.在目标1中，我将使用纤维光度学来探讨发育年龄和性别如何介导社会诱导的变化 体内多巴胺能神经活性。在目标2中，我将使用化学遗传学方法来研究扰动如何影响 敏感发育期的多巴胺回路影响成年配对结合表型。最后，在目标3中，我将 调查同性和异性社交互动转录特征的发育变化， 草原田鼠成熟后能够依赖多巴胺配对总之，这些努力将决定 社会经验如何跨越发展时间支架对结合多巴胺回路的成熟。这些 这些发现将为神经精神疾病中可能被破坏的分子和细胞过程提供新的见解。 涉及受损的结合行为的疾病，无法在传统的非结合啮齿动物模型中进行研究。

Project summary/Abstract The rewarding bonds we forge in adulthood, in particular our pair bonds with romantic partners, have innumerable protective effects on our brains and behaviors. Individuals with difficulties in social engagement and competence, such as those suffering from social anxiety, major depression, ADHD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder, are particularly susceptible to the health risks of social isolation and impoverished social networks. Aberrant activity of dopaminergic reward systems during adolescence coincides with the onset of many of these disorders, suggesting that developmental abnormalities in the neural substrates that promote social reward underlies disease pathology. Critically, most of what we know about the neural mechanisms that facilitate pair bonding come from the study of adult brains, highlighting a dire need to investigate the functional development of social bonding circuits to design better therapeutic treatments for social dysfunctions. The current proposal aims to leverage the socially monogamous prairie vole system to investigate the maturational changes in dopaminergic reward circuitry that initiate the capacity for pair bonding in adulthood. Prairie voles form strong pair bonds with their mates, which relies on the functional activity of dopamine systems. In Aim 1, I will use fiber photometry to ask how developmental age and sex mediates socially induced changes in in vivo dopaminergic neural activity. In Aim 2, I will use chemogenetic approaches to investigate how perturbing dopamine circuits during sensitive developmental periods impacts adult pair bonding phenotypes. Finally, in Aim 3 I will investigate the developmental changes in transcriptional signatures of same‐sex and opposite‐sex social interactions as prairie voles mature and become capable of dopamine‐dependent pair bonding. Altogether, these efforts will determine how social experiences across developmental time scaffold the maturation of pair bonding dopamine circuits. These findings will profer novel insights into the molecular and cellular processes that may be disrupted in neuropsychiatric illnesses involving impaired bonding behaviors, which cannot be investigated in traditional non‐bonding rodent models.