Meeting Abstract

P3-179  Monday, Jan. 6  Neural Transcriptomic Responses to Social Opportunity WANG, JY*; PAGGEOT, LX; FRIESEN, CN; SOLOMON-LANE, TK; HOFMANN, HA; YOUNG, RL; The University of Texas at Austin; The University of Texas at Austin; The University of Texas at Austin; The University of Texas at Austin; The University of Texas at Austin; The University of Texas at Austin joyce.wang@utexas.edu

Individuals respond to social challenges and opportunities at the levels of behavior, hormone profiles, neural activity, and gene expression. How these processes are integrated into context-appropriate behavior is not well understood. Behavioral responses to social stimuli are highly plastic and depend on many factors such as social status, past experience, motivation, stress and hormone levels. In vertebrates, this complex process depends on distributed processing of sensory signals across a highly interconnected set of limbic and hypothalamic brain areas known as the social decision making network (SDMN). Here, we characterize the neural transcriptomic response to a social opportunity using the highly social African cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni. We provided a subordinate male an opportunity to ascend in social status and quantified behavior and physiology at 1 hour, 1 day, and 1 week after the onset of social ascension, followed by microdissection of three critical SDMN nodes (homologs of the preoptic area, hippocampus, and lateral septum), which were subjected to Tag-Seq to obtain high-quality transcriptomes. Our results show that the three brain areas have distinct transcriptomic profiles and that gene expression profiles change in characteristic ways as animals ascend in social status in a complex manner. We identified 18 distinct gene expression trajectories, which are common to all three brain areas. Our results provide insight into the neuromolecular changes occurring throughout the process of social ascent.