Epigenetics & Neurobiology Unit, EMBL Rome, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Monterotondo, Italy.
EMBL and Heidelberg University, Faculty of Biosciences, Heidelberg, Germany.
Elife. 2020 Sep 21;9:e57148. doi: 10.7554/eLife.57148.
Social aggression and avoidance are defensive behaviors expressed by territorial animals in a manner appropriate to spatial context and experience. The ventromedial hypothalamus controls both social aggression and avoidance, suggesting that it may encode a general internal state of threat modulated by space and experience. Here, we show that neurons in the mouse ventromedial hypothalamus are activated both by the presence of a social threat as well as by a chamber where social defeat previously occurred. Moreover, under conditions where the animal could move freely between a home and defeat chamber, firing activity emerged that predicted the animal's position, demonstrating the dynamic encoding of spatial context in the hypothalamus. Finally, we found that social defeat induced a functional reorganization of neural activity as optogenetic activation could elicit avoidance after, but not before social defeat. These findings reveal how the hypothalamus dynamically encodes spatial and sensory cues to drive social behaviors.
社会攻击和回避是领地动物在空间背景和经验适当的情况下表现出的防御行为。腹内侧下丘脑控制着社会攻击和回避，这表明它可能编码了一种由空间和经验调节的一般内部威胁状态。在这里，我们发现小鼠腹内侧下丘脑的神经元既被社交威胁所激活，也被社交挫败前所在的腔室所激活。此外，在动物可以在家庭和挫败室之间自由移动的情况下，出现了预测动物位置的放电活动，这表明了下丘脑对空间背景的动态编码。最后，我们发现社交挫败引起了神经活动的功能重组，因为光遗传学激活可以在社交挫败后而不是之前引起回避。这些发现揭示了下丘脑如何动态编码空间和感官线索来驱动社会行为。
