Oxytocin has central actions that modulate synaptic plasticity and the occurrence of social behavior in rodents. The posterodorsal medial amygdala (MePD) composes a sexually dimorphic neural circuit for the display of male sexual behavior. Local dendritic spines are notably plastic and affected by context-dependent social stimuli. Here, we examined the effects of the selective deletion of the OT gene (OTKO) in the number and shape of Golgi-impregnated dendritic spines in the MePD of näive and sexually experienced (SexExp) male mice (n=6 each group). Compared to the control wild-type mice (WT), OTKO näive mice did not differ in the density of dendritic spines, but there was a significant and more intense reduction in the number of spines in the WT/SexExp (∼40%) than in the OTKO/SexExp (∼25%). This structural change had a spine-specific feature. That is, sexual experience induced a decrease in the number of thin (∼50%) and mushroom-like spines (∼35%) at the same time that increased (∼30%) the number of stubby/wide spines. In addition, the OTKO/SexExp animals have more thin and mushroom spines than the WT/SexExp ones (∼25% and 55%, respectively; p <0.01 in all cases). In conjunction, these novel data indicate that OT participates in the spine remodeling, synaptic refinement, and social stimuli-dependent plasticity in the MePD of male mice.
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