Cortical regulation of helping behaviour towards others in pain.

Humans and animals exhibit various forms of prosocial helping behaviour towards others in need. Although previous research has investigated how individuals may perceive others' states, the neural mechanisms of how they respond to others' needs and goals with helping behaviour remain largely unknown. Here we show that mice engage in a form of helping behaviour towards other individuals experiencing physical pain and injury-they exhibit allolicking (social licking) behaviour specifically towards the injury site, which aids the recipients in coping with pain.

Broad transcriptomic dysregulation occurs across the cerebral cortex in ASD.

Neuropsychiatric disorders classically lack defining brain pathologies, but recent work has demonstrated dysregulation at the molecular level, characterized by transcriptomic and epigenetic alterations. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this molecular pathology involves the upregulation of microglial, astrocyte and neural-immune genes, the downregulation of synaptic genes, and attenuation of gene-expression gradients in cortex. However, whether these changes are limited to cortical association regions or are more widespread remains unknown.

Neural basis of prosocial behavior.

The ability to behave in ways that benefit other individuals' well-being is among the most celebrated human characteristics crucial for social cohesiveness. Across mammalian species, animals display various forms of prosocial behaviors - comforting, helping, and resource sharing - to support others' emotions, goals, and/or material needs. In this review, we provide a cross-species view of the behavioral manifestations, proximate and ultimate drives, and neural mechanisms of prosocial behaviors.

Neural control of affiliative touch in prosocial interaction.

The ability to help and care for others fosters social cohesiveness and is vital to the physical and emotional well-being of social species, including humans. Affiliative social touch, such as allogrooming (grooming behaviour directed towards another individual), is a major type of prosocial behaviour that provides comfort to others. Affiliative touch serves to establish and strengthen social bonds between animals and can help to console distressed conspecifics.

An amygdala-to-hypothalamus circuit for social reward.

Social interactions and relationships are often rewarding, but the neural mechanisms through which social interaction drives positive experience remain poorly understood. In this study, we developed an automated operant conditioning system to measure social reward in mice and found that adult mice of both sexes display robust reinforcement of social interaction. Through cell-type-specific manipulations, we identified a crucial role for GABAergic neurons in the medial amygdala (MeA) in promoting the positive reinforcement of social interaction.

Correlated Neural Activity and Encoding of Behavior across Brains of Socially Interacting Animals.

Social interactions involve complex decision-making tasks that are shaped by dynamic, mutual feedback between participants. An open question is whether and how emergent properties may arise across brains of socially interacting individuals to influence social decisions. By simultaneously performing microendoscopic calcium imaging in pairs of socially interacting mice, we find that animals exhibit interbrain correlations of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex that are dependent on ongoing social interaction.

Sexually Dimorphic Control of Parenting Behavior by the Medial Amygdala.

Social behaviors, including behaviors directed toward young offspring, exhibit striking sex differences. Understanding how these sexually dimorphic behaviors are regulated at the level of circuits and transcriptomes will provide insights into neural mechanisms of sex-specific behaviors. Here, we uncover a sexually dimorphic role of the medial amygdala (MeA) in governing parental and infanticidal behaviors.

Chd2 Is Necessary for Neural Circuit Development and Long-Term Memory.

Considerable evidence suggests loss-of-function mutations in the chromatin remodeler CHD2 contribute to a broad spectrum of human neurodevelopmental disorders. However, it is unknown how CHD2 mutations lead to impaired brain function. Here we report mice with heterozygous mutations in Chd2 exhibit deficits in neuron proliferation and a shift in neuronal excitability that included divergent changes in excitatory and inhibitory synaptic function.

Detecting Activated Cell Populations Using Single-Cell RNA-Seq.

Single-cell RNA sequencing offers a promising opportunity for probing cell types mediating specific behavioral functions and the underlying molecular programs. However, this has been hampered by a long-standing issue in transcriptional profiling of dissociated cells, specifically the transcriptional perturbations that are artificially induced during conventional whole-cell dissociation procedures. Here, we develop Act-seq, which minimizes artificially induced transcriptional perturbations and allows for faithful detection of both baseline transcriptional profiles and acute transcriptional changes elicited by behavior/experience-driven activity.