Zhang Yun-Feng, Janke Emma, Bhattarai Janardhan P, Wesson Daniel W, Ma Minghong
Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA.
iScience. 2022 Apr 22;25(5):104284. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104284. eCollection 2022 May 20.
Self-grooming is a stereotyped behavior displayed by nearly all animals. Among other established functions, self-grooming is implicated in social communication. However, whether self-grooming specifically influences behaviors of nearby individuals has not been directly tested, partly because of the technical challenge of inducing self-grooming in a reliable and temporally controllable manner. We recently found that optogenetic activation of dopamine D3 receptor expressing neurons in the ventral striatal islands of Calleja robustly induces orofacial grooming in mice. Using this optogenetic manipulation, here we demonstrate that observer mice exhibit social preference for mice that groom more regardless of biological sex. Moreover, grooming-induced social attraction depends on volatile chemosensory cues broadcasted from grooming mice. Collectively, our study establishes self-grooming as a means of promoting social attraction among mice via volatile cues, suggesting an additional benefit for animals to allocate a significant amount of time to this behavior.
自我梳理是几乎所有动物都会表现出的一种刻板行为。在其他已确定的功能中，自我梳理与社会交流有关。然而，自我梳理是否会特别影响附近个体的行为尚未得到直接验证，部分原因是难以以可靠且可在时间上控制的方式诱导自我梳理。我们最近发现，对小鼠腹侧纹状体中表达多巴胺D3受体的神经元进行光遗传学激活，可有力地诱导其口面部梳理行为。利用这种光遗传学操作，我们在此证明，观察小鼠对梳理次数更多的小鼠表现出社会偏好，而不论其生物学性别如何。此外，梳理诱导的社会吸引力取决于梳理小鼠散发的挥发性化学感觉线索。总体而言，我们的研究表明自我梳理是通过挥发性线索促进小鼠之间社会吸引力的一种方式，这表明动物将大量时间用于这种行为还有额外的益处。
