Cell sub-journal: Social isolation affects brain gene expression, disrupts brain development

Written by | Edited by Wang Cong | Typesetting by Wang Duoyu | Shui Wenwen Social animals rely on interaction with animals of the same species to survive, and individuals act as part of a gro.
Our common ants and bees are typical social animals, and we humans are also social anima.
As social animals, if the individual is isolated from the social group, it can adversely affect the individual's health, longevity, and surviv.
The impact of social isolation on individuals is even more profound during sensitive developmental periods, such as early life, when social isolation at this time can strongly influence an individual's "social competence", the ability to adjust behavior in response to changes in the social environme.
This can lead to poorer developmental or health outcom.
For example, social isolation of mice, fish, flies, crickets, e.
increases their aggressi.
Recently, Sarah Kocher's team at Princeton University (first author Wang Yan, now an assistant professor at the University of Washington) published a research paper entitled: Isolation disrupts social interactions and destabilizes brain development in bumblebees in Current Biology, a sub-journal of Ce.
The study found that social isolation disrupts future social interactions, affects brain gene expression, and disrupts brain developme.
A growing body of research shows that social isolation affects the behavior and physiology of social animals such as bees and an.
In the paper, the research team studied bumblebees, a stocky bee, to uncover the impact of social isolation on individuals, social behavior, gene expression, and brain development in social animals
Bumblebees live in social groups of about 100 to 20 worker bees and a queen, and within groups, individual bumblebees show consistent differences in behavior that stabilize over time and environme.
These behavioral lineages are established through pairwise and spatial interactions between individuals during the first 1-2 weeks of adultho.
During this period, the bumblebee's brain is developing rapid.
To determine whether and how social isolation affects bumblebees' social behavior, the research team experimentally altered their social environment during early developmental stages of life and then paired them either alone or with social partne.
Analyze the behavior of individual bumblebe.
The research team collected juvenile bumblebee worker bees that had not yet emerged and assigned them to three different environments, isolated from external hearing, sight and smell: isolation: a single bumblebee was isolated; Group-housed: 4 bumblebees were placed together outside the colony environment; colony-housed: individual bumblebees were placed in a normal colony environme.

These bumblebees were reared for 9 consecutive days in the above environme.

Bumblebees isolated in isolation were reared with no social experience at all, while bumblebees in collective and group environments experienced varying degrees of socializati.

On day 10 after eclosion, they were subjected to behavioral analysis and tissues were collected for downstream analysis (gene expression and brain developmental morpholog.

First, the behavioral analysis showed that the bumblebees in the three different environments showed different behavioral characteristics when they were alo.
They were then individually paired with other bumble bees, and the results showed that bumble bees that developed in group and group environments exhibited similar behaviors, while bumble bees that developed in isolation showed more social interactions with their paired bumble be.

More close encounters occurr.

To determine the neurobiological relevance of these differences, the team further examined gene expression in their brains, as well as the volume of key brain regio.

The results of detection and analysis showed that social isolation disturbed the neural genome expression of bumblebe.

Compared with bumblebees developed in the collective environment, there were significant differences in the expression of 27 genes between the bumblebees developed in the isolation environment and the group environme.

There were 94 significant differences in gene expression compared to developing bumblebe.

However, there was no significant difference in gene expression between the bumblebees developed in the collective environment and the bumblebees developed in the group environme.

Given the wide-ranging effects social isolation has on brain gene expression, the research team next tested whether social isolation affects brain development, establishing an annotated brain template of bumblebees by confocal imagi.

The results showed that the average size of the brain regions of the bumblebees developed in the isolation environment, the collective environment and the group environment were similar, and the brain regions of the bumblebees developed in the collective environment and the group environment were similar in size and homogenei.

very hi.

However, the volume of brain regions of different individuals of bumblebees developed in isolation environment is very different, with obvious heterogenei.

This suggests that social isolation indeed disrupts bumblebee brain development, and that bumblebees in social isolation have erratic and random trajectories of brain developme.

Overall, the study found that social isolation increases social interaction and affects brain gene expression, disrupting brain developme.

The study also found that limited social experience in a small group setting is also sufficient to maintain brain development and social behavior

Yan Wang.

Yan Wang tweeted that the work on the impact of social isolation on behavior and the brain, published in Current Biology, is a good end to his postdoctoral career at Princeton Universi.

Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Biology at the University of Washington, after receiving her undergraduate degrees in biology and .


in neurobiology from Cornell University and the University of Chicago, respectively, and postdoctoral training at Princeton Universi.

Related reading On August 31, 2020, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the United States published a research paper entitled: A prefrontal–paraventricular thalamus circuit requires juvenile social experience to regulate adult sociability in mice in the journal Nature Neuroscien.

The prefrontal cortex is a key part of the brain that regulates social behavior, and this study in mice identified specific subsets of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex that are required for normal social behavior in adulthood Social isolation in adolescence is very fragi.

By stimulating specific prefrontal circuits in thalamic regions in adulthood, the social inadequacy caused by social isolation in adolescence can be rescued, which brings a promising new target for the treatment of social behavioral defici.

Loneliness can pose a serious threat to mental heal.

In the age of so much online information, we should be more and more connected to the wor.

However, young people feel more and more lone.

The COVID-19 pandemic in recent years has forced social isolation, school closures, and work holidays in many places, and many people have to stay at ho.

This state of social isolation has also increased the impact of social isolation on mental health and brain developme.

dema.
Several studies have shown that social isolation during COVID-19 significantly increases the incidence and symptoms of depressi.

Whether social isolation has an impact on adolescents who are at a critical moment in brain development is a direction worth explori.

Paper link: https://d.

org/11016.

c.

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