MAPPING THE CORTICAL REPRESENTATION OF CONSPECIFIC VOCALIZATIONS IN THE NAKED MOLE-RAT

The naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is a subterranean rodent that forms highly cooperative, hierarchical colonies headed by a queen. These social mammals also produce over 25 distinct vocalizations that encode individual and colony identity, thus representing a promising and unexplored model to study the neural circuits underlying social communication. We are aiming to investigate the network dynamics of auditory cortical processing in response to socially meaningful sounds. To do so, we are first localizing the auditory cortex using retrograde viral tracing from the inferior colliculus. Secondly, we have developed and optimised surgical approaches to perform in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the auditory cortex during natural and synthetic sound presentation. We will present our first tracing and ephys results, including an initial characterization of the tonotopic organization of the auditory regions in the naked mole-rat brain as well the localization of auditory areas involved in the processing of conspecific vocalizations. Taken together, these experiments will help elucidate the role of the auditory cortex in the representation of identity in a eusocial mammal and continue to establish the naked mole-rat as a model for systems-level studies of vocal communication.