Coordinated Brain-Network Dynamics of Maternal Adaptation

Abstract

The maternal brain exhibits impressive plasticity, undergoing many anatomical and functional alterations over the transition to parenting. Such alterations can reflect maternal adaptation to offspring needs, aligning with the onset and maintenance of maternal care behaviors. These brain-wide neural changes occur across stages, starting during pregnancy and continuing through the peripartal transition. We therefore wanted to understand brain changes with pregnancy, parenting, and care behaviors over time. Many brain regions have been implicated in the coordination of maternal adaptation and corresponding care behaviors. We used computational modeling of multi-region neural oscillation data to identify distinct electrical networks during naturally-occurring care behaviors and across multiple maternal stages in outbred, highly maternal mice. This work demonstrates that multi-region oscillatory electrical dynamics at high spatiotemporal resolution reflect these functions. Distinct, discriminative networks predict maternal behavior and stage, showcasing network adaptation with parental transition. Maternal behavior and stage also had substantial effects on other distinct, multi-region oscillatory electrical networks relevant to stress susceptibility, further linking maternal adaptation to the neurophysiology of stress. While these stress networks were perturbed by maternal experience of early life stress, networks trained on maternal behavior and stage remained robust against such perturbation. This suggests a uniquely persistent strength of maternal electrical dynamics. Together, this work supports the role of oscillatory electrical dynamics as networks underlying fundamentally conserved behaviors and transitions, demonstrating wide relevance and significance to brain-behavior discovery.