Lectures and seminars StratNeuro Seminar with Professor Nirao Shah

Title: "Molecular and neural control of innate social behaviors." 

Our long-term goal is to define the molecular and neural networks that regulate sexually differentiated physiology and behavior. The behaviors that we focus on are social behaviors such as mating, territorial aggression, and maternal behaviors. These behaviors are innate in the sense that they can be displayed without prior training. Although these behaviors are the result of developmentally programmed pathways, we and others have shown that they are responsive to social context and prior experience. We leverage our understanding of sex determination, development, and physiology to achieve our goals, working primarily in mice but also with fruit flies and prairie voles to answer scientific questions best addressed in these organisms.

Sexually dimorphic social behaviors emerge from sexually differentiated neural circuits, and we have employed identification of sex differences in gene expression or neuronal populations as a means to understand principles governing the display of these behaviors. Key conceptual advances include the fact that male and female brains utilize distinct neural circuits for innate social behaviors. Furthermore, the genetic and neural networks that regulate sexually dimorphic social behaviors are highly modular, with different genes and neural pathways regulating one or a few aspects of an individual social behavior but not other behaviors.

Recent studies from our lab have identified specific neurons in the hypothalamus and amygdala that regulate sex recognition, mating, and aggression. In my presentation, I will discuss these findings and more recent follow up studies that shed mechanistic insights into the molecular and neural underpinnings of sex-typical behaviors and physiology.