Topic: maternal behavior

Maternal motivation enables heightened responsivity of mothers towards offspring. While this motivational state is critical to infant survival, little is known about its regulation. Previous work in maternal rodents demonstrates that lesioning ventral tegmental area (VTA) neurons disrupts maternal motivated behaviors; and that these behaviors are restored by manipulating pup sensory salience (i.e., by increasing pup cries) and maternal states (Hansen 1994 Physiol Behav). Additionally, the neurohormone oxytocin is known to promote VTA-mediated maternal behaviors including infant approach and nu

Distress calls of mice pups outside their nest elicit reliable pup retrieval in maternal female mice but not in their virgin (`naive') conspecifics. However, when co-housed with maternal mice, naive mice become `experienced' and learn to reliably perform pup retrieval. This process correlates with neuronal changes in the primary auditory cortex (A1): While excitatory (E) neuron responses are sharply tuned to a certain inter- pup-call interval and inhibitory (I) neuron responses are broadly tuned in naive mice, the two neuron types are co-tuned in experienced mice. This change in behavior and t

Parental care is crucial for the survival and development of offspring in altricial mammalian species. While maternal behavior in postpartum females is already well understood, the neural mechanisms underlying the acquisition of maternal behavior without prior experience still remains unclear. In this project we aimed to understand and decipher the individual key mechanism underlying this ability.We could demonstrate that virgin females can rapidly develop maternal care behavior upon first-time pup exposure, and that this process is initiated by the activation of the anterior cingulate cortex

The lateral septum (LS) demonstrates activation in response to pup exposure in rat mothers, and its lesions eliminate maternal behaviors suggesting its involvement in maternal brain circuitry. This study shows that the density of pup-activated neurons in the ventral subdivision of the LS (LSv) is nearly equivalent to that in the medial preoptic area (MPOA), the major regulatory site of maternal behavior. When somatosensory inputs including suckling are not allowed, pup-induced activation was markedly reduced in the LSv. Retrograde tract tracing identified various brain regions potentially infl

Maternal care is essential for infant survival across mammalian species. In rodents, a classical maternal behavior, retrieving astray pups back to the nest (“pup retrieval”), is broadly expressed by mothers, even those with no previous experience (e.g., primiparous mothers), suggesting that this behavior emerges through hard-wired neural mechanisms that are activated during motherhood. However, sexually- and pup-naïve female mice (virgins) are also able to perform this behavior if exposed to mothers and their litter, insinuating that there is a learning component to this behavior that is indep

Prosocial and affiliative behaviors depend on intricate neuroendocrine neuronal circuits. Dynamic neuroglial interactions play pivotal roles in shaping synaptic networks, whose alterations are known to contribute to psychiatric disorders linked to social deficits. Yet the involvement of astrocytes in regulating maternal behavior remains unclear. In this study, we used a pup sensitization model with virgin pup naïve female adult mice, to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying maternal behavior in the supraoptic nucleus. We assessed oxytocin-level in the extracellular fluid through in v

Pups-naïve adult mice display two opposite responses when they are exposed to pups for the first time. Females rapidly display maternal behavior (MB); however, males display infanticidal behavior (IB). In previous studies, we found a different pattern of expression of c-Fos in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and nucleus accumbens (NAcc) when females and males displayed MB and IB respectively for the first time.We investigated if NMDA-induced lesions in the mPFC or the NAcc inhibited MB or IB in pups-naïve adult female and male mice. Furthermore, we investigated whether 6-OHDA-induced lesio