Neurobehavioral Mechanisms of Social Behavior and Familial Structure

About This Grant

Project Summary The family is the canonical basis of social structure for mammalian species. Families help ensure that offspring survive, learn pivotal skills, and thrive. Adults initially find mates and have behavioral adaptations to ensure the welfare of the mother and prepare for postnatal care. After parturition, offspring require intense caregiving by one or more adults for nourishment, warmth, and protection over varying periods of postnatal development. This commonly requires a lactating mother until infants transition to other food sources. Despite millennia of neuro- behavioral adaptations, infant and adult mortality can be shockingly high, even in the seemingly ideal conditions of lab vivaria. In more natural environments, families must contend with other challenges: infection, weather, predators, and conspecific competition for scarce resources. The dynamic and unpredictable nature of such stressors means that flexible strategies are required for success and survival. This requires socially- or environmentally-induced neuroplasticity and complex decision-making in the face of life-or-death stakes. Here we propose a collaboration between behavioral neuroscientists, a theorist, and an engineer to develop and validate a new integrated system for life-long and high-resolution monitoring of mouse colony life. Technological and computational advances over the last decade, in part pioneered by our groups, now enable studies of neural circuits for social and parental behavior in complex environments in ways not formerly feasible or even possible. There have been major improvements in wireless recording, cell- and circuit-specific methods for measuring and manipulating brain activity and behavior, algorithms for neural data analysis, methods for quantifying multi-animal behavioral interactions, and capacity to store and share large data sets. This now provides an opportunity to build a theoretical and quantitative framework for understanding mouse social behavior and family life, with models constrained by continuous video synchronized with neural recordings. Our main hypothesis is that the duties and challenges of parenting define many aspects of mouse adult social behavior. Specifically, we predict that the need to provide safety and support to offspring leads to systematic engagement in territorialism, nest/burrow construction, foraging, mating, and then recruitment of co- parents initiated by the dam. In Aim 1, we will quantify behaviors in a new statistical framework of one or two colonies of 5 mice each with a litter of pups, in 3-D engineered burrows with food and water above-ground, using machine learning methods and a large data center provided by NYU. In Aim 2, we will validate and optimize a new wireless high-frequency single-cell imaging system to reveal the activity of molecularly defined cell types as animals engage in cooperative and competitive foraging and childcare, with a focus on the hypothalamus. In Aim 3, we track individuals over time, perturbing specific hypothalamic cell types and updating our model to reflect individual brain states and hormone systems on survival strategies.