Cellular basis of complex behavior

About This Grant

Summary/Abstract A broad goal for biologists is to understand how genetic variation influences phenotype, including development, physiology, and disease. For complex behaviors, it remains difficult to trace a path from the genome to particular cell populations to brain function. The proposed research will identify how natural variation in vertebrate social behavior is encoded within the genome and executed in the brain via context dependent gene expression in specific cell types. To accomplish this, the team will utilize the assemblage of cichlids from Lake Malawi, East Africa to take advantage of rapid evolution that generated large differences in social behavior with minimal genetic divergence. New automated methods to quantify differences in male and female social behavior will be employed. RNA-seq and ATAC-seq from the same single cells will be used to (i) map forebrain cell types recruited during courtship behavior and (ii) identify cis-regulatory circuits in these brain regions. Near-isogenic lines (NILs) will be constructed to link regions of the genome to specific cell types and species-divergent behavioral subroutines. Collectively, this work will identify how the genome encodes gene expression programs in specific cell types to regulate divergent, recently evolved social behaviors in outbred vertebrates.