Biology subjects

Bogado Lopes, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Bogado Lopes, J..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Early-life experience determines the social stability of adult communities in female mice

Early social interactions critically shape lifelong individual behaviour but their development and stability have been difficult to study in laboratory settings. Our experimental platform allows the automated real-time and longitudinal study of social structure in mice living in a shared environment, providing previously inaccessible behavioural measures. These include estimates of directed agonistic activity for the reconstruction of social hierarchies and their dynamics over the life-course. In an all-female colony of genetically identical mice, pairwise inter-individual interactions revealed stable dominance hierarchies that already emerged early in life. Older animals introduced into a new colony exhibited a steeper hierarchy compared to adolescent mice or mature mice that had been co-housed throughout life. Our longitudinal analysis of social dominance hierarchies highlights the critical role of early-life experience. One-Sentence SummaryAutomated tracking of mouse colonies revealed differences in social structure dependent on the animals early-life experience.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Individual behavioral trajectories shape whole-brain connectivity in mice

It is widely assumed that our actions shape our brains and that the resulting connections determine who we are. To test this idea in a reductionist setting, in which genes and environment are controlled, we investigated differences in neuroanatomy and structural covariance by ex vivo structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in mice whose behavioral activity was continuously tracked for 3 months in a large, enriched environment. We confirmed that environmental enrichment increases mouse hippocampal volumes. Stratifying the enriched group according to individual longitudinal behavioral trajectories, however, revealed striking differences in mouse brain structural covariance in continuously highly active mice compared to those whose trajectories showed signs of habituating activity. Network-based statistics identified distinct sub-networks of murine structural covariance underlying these differences in behavioral activity. Together, these results reveal that differentiated behavioral trajectories of mice in an enriched environment are associated with differences in brain connectivity.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Early-life environmental enrichment generates persistent individualized behavior in mice

Individuals differ in their response to environmental stimuli, but the stability of individualized behaviors and their associated changes in brain plasticity are poorly understood. We developed a novel model of enriched environment to longitudinally monitor 40 inbred mice exploring 35 connected cages over periods of three to six months. We show that behavioral individuality that emerged during the first three months of environmental enrichment persisted when mice were withdrawn from the enriched environment for three additional months. Behavioral trajectories were associated with stable inter-individual differences in adult hippocampal neurogenesis and persistent epigenetic effects on neuronal plasticity genes in the hippocampus. Using genome-wide DNA methylation sequencing, we show that one third of the DNA methylation changes were maintained after withdrawal from the enriched environment. Our results suggest that, even under the most constraint conditions controlling genes and environment, early-life experiences result in lasting individualized changes in behavior and brain plasticity.

neuroscience↗