Meeting Abstract
Communication of hunger during infancy is our first social interaction, laying the foundation for a healthy life by acquiring nutrition and establishing strong social bonds with caregivers. However, the neural basis of neonate social communication is not well understood. The Forkhead Box P2 (FOXP2) protein has been implicated in several human communication disorders, including deficits in language through abnormal development of motor neural circuits. This protein has also been linked to communication in songbirds, honeybees, and rodents. We studied the neural basis of neonate communication of nutritional need in Mimetic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) tadpoles. In this species, mothers feed tadpoles unfertilized eggs after the tadpole performs a begging display characterized by vigorously dancing back and forth. Preliminary data from our lab suggested that FOXP2-positive neurons are active during these tadpole begging displays. In this study, tadpoles were placed individually in an arena for 30 minutes with either an adult female, a conspecific tadpole, or a novel object as a non-social control. After quantifying the begging behavior displayed by the tadpoles, the tadpole brains were isolated and immunohistochemistry was used to visualize a marker of neural activation (pS6) and FOXP2. FOXP2 was widely distributed in the brain, with FOXP2-positive cells in the striatum, hypothalamus, and spinal cord, among other brain regions. In particular, FOXP2 colocalized with a marker of neural activation predominantly in the cerebellum and the thalamus. Current work involves generating brain-specific knockdowns of FOXP2 to functionally test the role of this protein in amphibian communication. Overall, this work points to a conserved role for FOXP2 in social communication and thus provide important insights into how infants convey their nutritional needs.
