Meeting Abstract
Hormones play a key role in initiating and maintaining parental behaviors, but we know little about underlying genomic activity driving these processes. In the rock dove (Columba livia), both sexes engage in all stages of contact-incubation and chick-rearing. This begs the question, are the underlying mechanisms facilitating these parental care behaviors the same in males and females? Using a highly replicated RNAseq experiment, we investigated how gene expression in three important tissues critical for reproductive behavior, the hypothalamus in the brain, the pituitary gland, and the gonads (testes and ovaries), changes in both sexes over the course of the parental care. We found parental care stage-specific and tissue-specific sex-biased gene expression in substrates commonly investigated when studying parental care and reproduction. In addition, we uncovered new genes to target for further investigations. Our results unveil the dynamic and sex-biased nature of the genome over the course of parental care. We will discuss how these data are now providing a foundation for our ongoing hypothesis-driven studies of mechanisms regulating parental care.
