An epigenomic shift in amygdala marks the transition to maternal behaviors in alloparenting virgin female mice.

Adults of many species will care for young offspring that are not their own, a phenomenon called alloparenting. However, in many cases, nonparental adults must be sensitized by repeated or extended exposures to newborns before they will robustly display parental-like behaviors. To capture neurogenomic events underlying the transition to active parental caring behaviors, we analyzed brain gene expression and chromatin profiles of virgin female mice co-housed with pregnant dams during pregnancy and after birth.

A Mouse Mutation That Dysregulates Neighboring and Genes Is Associated with Phenotypes Related to the Human AUTS2 Syndrome.

was originally discovered as the gene disrupted by a translocation in human twins with Autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, and epilepsy. Since that initial finding, -linked mutations and variants have been associated with a very broad array of neuropsychiatric disorders, sugg esting that is required for fundamental steps of neurodevelopment. However, genotype-phenotype correlations in this region are complicated, because most mutations could also involve neighboring genes.

Cross-species systems analysis of evolutionary toolkits of neurogenomic response to social challenge.

Social challenges like territorial intrusions evoke behavioral responses in widely diverging species. Recent work has showed that evolutionary "toolkits"-genes and modules with lineage-specific variations but deep conservation of function-participate in the behavioral response to social challenge. Here, we develop a multispecies computational-experimental approach to characterize such a toolkit at a systems level.

ZSCAN5B and primate-specific paralogs bind RNA polymerase III genes and extra-TFIIIC (ETC) sites to modulate mitotic progression.

Mammalian genomes contain hundreds of genes transcribed by RNA Polymerase III (Pol III), encoding noncoding RNAs and especially the tRNAs specialized to carry specific amino acids to the ribosome for protein synthesis. In addition to this well-known function, tRNAs and their genes (tDNAs) serve a variety of other critical cellular functions. For example, tRNAs and other Pol III transcripts can be cleaved to yield small RNAs with potent regulatory activities.

Tbx18 Regulates the Differentiation of Periductal Smooth Muscle Stroma and the Maintenance of Epithelial Integrity in the Prostate.

The T-box transcription factor TBX18 is essential to mesenchymal cell differentiation in several tissues and Tbx18 loss-of-function results in dramatic organ malformations and perinatal lethality. Here we demonstrate for the first time that Tbx18 is required for the normal development of periductal smooth muscle stromal cells in prostate, particularly in the anterior lobe, with a clear impact on prostate health in adult mice. Prostate abnormalities are only subtly apparent in Tbx18 mutants at birth; to examine postnatal prostate development we utilized a relatively long-lived hypomorphic mutant and a novel conditional Tbx18 allele.