AI Article Synopsis
- Research has shown that gut microbiota can affect behavior, particularly in social and stress-related contexts, yet mechanisms are not fully understood.
- Using socially-monogamous prairie voles, the study found that live probiotics decreased social behaviors in females and revealed sex differences in anxiety-like behaviors and neurochemical markers.
- The gut microbiome composition changed significantly with treatments, highlighting correlations between gut microbiota diversity, brain chemistry, and behavior, emphasizing the prairie vole as a valuable model for future research on the gut-brain axis.
Article Abstract
Research on the role of gut microbiota in behavior has grown dramatically. The probiotic can alter social and stress-related behaviors - yet, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. Although traditional laboratory rodents provide a foundation for examining the role of on the gut-brain axis, they do not naturally display a wide variety of social behaviors. Using the highly-social, monogamous prairie vole (), we examined the effects of administration on behaviors, neurochemical marker expression, and gut-microbiome composition. Females, but not males, treated with live displayed lower levels of social affiliation compared to those treated with heat-killed . Overall, females displayed a lower level of anxiety-like behaviors than males. Live -treated females had lower expression of corticotrophin releasing factor (CRF) and CRF type-2-receptor in the nucleus accumbens, and lower vasopressin 1a-receptor in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN), but increased CRF in the PVN. There were both baseline sex differences and sex-by-treatment differences in gut microbiome composition. Live increased the abundance of several taxa, including , NK4A136, and . Interestingly, heat-killed increased abundance of the beneficial taxa and . There were significant correlations between changes in microbiota, brain neurochemical markers, and behaviors. Our data indicate that impacts gut microbiota, gut-brain axis and behaviors in a sex-specific manner in socially-monogamous prairie voles. This demonstrates the utility of the prairie vole model for further examining causal impacts of microbiome on brain and behavior.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9945313 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2023.1015666 | DOI Listing |
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