Stowers Lisa, Liberles Stephen D
Department of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 02037, United States.
Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, United States.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2016 Jun;38:74-9. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2016.04.001. Epub 2016 Apr 16.
A single sensory cue can evoke different behaviors that vary by recipient. Responses may be influenced by sex, internal state, experience, genotype, and coincident environmental stimuli. Pheromones are powerful inducers of mouse behavior, yet pheromone responses are not always stereotyped. For example, male and female mice respond differently to sex pheromones while mothers and virgin females respond differently to pup cues. Here, we review the origins of variability in responses to reproductive pheromones. Recent advances have indicated how response variability may arise through modulation at different levels of pheromone-processing circuitry, from sensory neurons in the periphery to central neurons in the vomeronasal amygdala. Understanding mechanisms underlying conditional pheromone responses should reveal how neural circuits can be flexibly sculpted to alter behavior.
单一的感官线索能够引发不同的行为，这些行为因接受者而异。反应可能会受到性别、内部状态、经验、基因型以及同时出现的环境刺激的影响。信息素是诱导小鼠行为的强大因素，然而信息素反应并不总是刻板不变的。例如，雄性和雌性小鼠对性信息素的反应不同，而母亲和未生育的雌性对幼崽线索的反应也不同。在这里，我们回顾了对生殖信息素反应变异性的起源。最近的进展表明，反应变异性可能是如何通过从外周的感觉神经元到犁鼻器杏仁核中的中枢神经元等信息素处理回路的不同水平的调节而产生的。理解条件性信息素反应背后的机制应该能够揭示神经回路如何能够被灵活塑造以改变行为。
