Neural Circuits and Systems Neuroscience
Author: Paula Funaro | email: paufunaro@gmail.com
Paula Funaro 1°, Veronica de la Fuente 1°
1° INSTITUTO DE FISIOLOGÍA, BIOLOGÍA MOLECULAR Y NEUROCIENCIAS (IFIBYNE-UBA-CONICET), FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS EXACTAS Y NATURALES, UNIVERSIDAD DE BUENOS AIRES
The ability to learn and remember conspecifics is critical to the stability of social groups. Lack of social interaction predisposes to depression and anxiety. Social interactions depend on the ability to recognize peers and decipher their expressions and emotions. Disturbances in these abilities represent a hallmark of some psychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disorders. In rodents, social recognition tasks (SRT) reflect their ability to identify and remember conspecifics. The general aim of our long-term project is to gain knowledge of the neural circuits involved in social recognition and social memory. In this project, we first assessed different parameters that could affect the saliency of the mice used as stimuli. Then, we aimed to determine which areas of the brain are active after the SRT using the neural activity marker cFOS. So far our results indicate that using stimuli from the same home-cage have similar salience than using stimuli from different home-cages. In regard to the immunohistochemistry studies, mice that underwent a SRT have cFOS positive cells in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus -a brain zone that expresses oxytocin-, and in the CA2 region of the hippocampus, which has been shown to participate in social memory formation. We hypothesize that the number of cFOS positive cells will be higher in these mice than in controls. Future experiments will be discussed in order to continue the project.