Biology subjects

Grieco, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Grieco, F..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Natural variations in maternal behaviour shape trait anxiety and hippocampal neurogenesis in offspring

Understanding the early origins of emotional traits and baseline anxiety is crucial for the development of personalized medicine in mood disorders. While previous research primarily focused on extreme conditions like chronic maternal deprivation, in the present study, we investigated how natural variations in maternal care influence anxiety-related behaviour and neurogenesis in C57BL/6J offspring in a longitudinal manner. We observed that mothers engaging in low maternal care (LMC) displayed lower adult neurogenesis in both the olfactory bulb and the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus compared to high maternal care (HMC) mothers. We then observed that LMC-reared pups exhibited increased anxiety-related behaviour at postnatal day (PND) 5, 9, and 22. Furthermore, maternal behaviour induced the development of emotional individuality at early stage. This mood-related phenotype in LMC-reared offspring was associated with decreased neurogenesis after weaning at PND24. In another group of litters, we further examined neurogenesis at an earlier age (PND9) and already found a reduction in the population of adult neural progenitor cells and cell proliferation in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus of LMC-reared pups. These results highlight that natural variations in early life experiences such as maternal care, shape long-term brain plasticity and behaviour in offspring. This underscores the relevance of maternal care and adult neurogenesis in shaping personality-like traits related to mood disorders.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Natural variations of adult neurogenesis and anxiety predict hierarchical status of inbred mice

Hierarchy provides a survival advantage to social animals in challenging circumstances. In mice, social dominance is associated with trait anxiety and reduced stress resilience which are regulated by adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Here, we tested whether adult hippocampal neurogenesis may regulate social dominance behavior. We observed that future dominant individuals exhibited higher trait anxiety and lower levels of hippocampal neurogenesis prior to social hierarchy formation, suggesting that baseline neurogenesis might predict individual social status among a group. This phenotype persisted after social hierarchy was stable. Experimentally reducing neurogenesis prior to the stabilization of social hierarchy in group-housed males increased the probability of mice to become dominant and increased anxiety. Finally, when innate dominance was assessed in socially isolated and anxiety-matched animals, mice with impaired neurogenesis displayed a dominant status toward strangers. Together, these results indicate that adult neurogenesis predicts and regulates hierarchical and situational dominance behavior along with anxiety-related behavior. These results provide a framework to study the mechanisms underlying social hierarchy and the dysregulation of dominance behavior in psychiatric diseases related to anxiety.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Platelet-derived LPA16:0 inhibits adult neurogenesis and stress resilience in anxiety disorder

Anxiety disorders are accompanied by changes in brain plasticity, stress vulnerability and heightened risk of depression. Here, we found that serum LPA16:0 abundance increased with trait anxiety in both human and mice and was sufficient to reduce the proliferation of adult hippocampal neural stem/progenitor cells. In humans, the main LPA receptor, LPA1, bears single nucleotide polymorphism variants associated with anxiety. In mice, LPA16:0 decreased hippocampal neurogenesis and stress resilience, whereas LPA1 antagonism or the reduction of platelets, the main source of circulating LPA16:0, increased adult neurogenesis and resilience to acute stress. Finally, the inhibition of adult neurogenesis abolished the beneficial effect of LPA1 antagonism on resilience against both acute and chronic stress. Together, these findings identify LPA16:0-LPA1 signaling as a regulation mechanism of adult neurogenesis and a potential therapeutic target for mood disorders.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Young Eurasian Scops Owls make individually distinctive vocalizations

Vocal distinctiveness is expected to occur more often in colonial-breeding species as the parents need to recognize their offspring in a large group of conspecifics. Territorial species like the Scops Owl are expected to exhibit low distinctiveness. Contrary to what was expected, spectrographic analysis of the food-begging calls of young Scops Owls revealed previously unknown, complex acoustic structure. Within recording sessions, call duration exhibited the highest repeatability (average R 0.82), followed by the peak frequency in the last third of the call (0.61). Other spectral measures showed low to moderate repeatability (0.32 - 0.57), while the time between subsequent calls was the least repeatable (0.15). When comparing recordings made on different nights, Linear Discriminant Analysis assigned 55.7% of the calls to the correct individual, and 73.1% when restricting analysis within broods. When analyzing variability across recordings, individuals explained most of the variation in Call duration and Peak frequency in the last third of the call (89.5 % and 81.2 %, respectively), while recordings explained little variation (3.4 % and 1.3 %, respectively), suggesting that those acoustic features were the most important in vocal stability and distinctiveness. The calculated information capacity HS was 4.48 bits, i.e. within the range of values found in loosely-colonial species. The results suggest that the vocalizations of young Scops Owls show moderate individuality that could only help offspring recognition among a small number of individuals. However, the functional significance of call distinctiveness remains unclear; a few hypotheses are discussed. Keywords: Acoustic signature, coloniality, fledglings, individuality, Otus scops, repeatability.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

Pervasive low-frequency vocal modulation during territorial contests in Eurasian Scops Owls (Otus scops)

In several animal species, including birds, individuals are known to produce low-frequency vocalizations during aggressive interactions with conspecifics. In this study, I investigated territorial interactions between male Eurasian Scops Owls that occupy territories in a densely-packed area. The single-note hoot of the Scops Owl is generally assumed to be highly repeatable, however extensive recording of male-male interactions identified previously unrecognized variation in the hoots structure. Male Scops Owls gave hoots at a frequency lower than usual when engaging in short-distance contests with neighbouring males. Within-subject analysis revealed that the callers average hoot frequency was positively correlated with the distance from its rival. During contests, males gradually reduced their hoot frequency as they approached one another, perhaps reflecting changes in the degree of escalation. Male Scops Owls reduced their hoot frequency immediately after the rival initiated countersinging, and returned to their usual frequency range at the end of the contest. These findings demonstrate that vocal modulation is pervasive in social contexts in the Scops Owl, and suggests that individuals have full voluntary control of the structure of their vocalizations. This study confirms in part the findings of other authors experimental work, where male owls adjusted their vocal frequency when challenged by an opponent. However, that study suggested that vocal frequency would encode information about the callers body weight. In contrast, the present study revealed context-dependent fluctuations in hoot frequency, which may suggest that the hoot of the Scops Owl dynamically reflects the current motivational state of the caller during the contest.

animal behavior and cognition↗