Liangyi Chen's team collaborated to reveal mice's preference for "like the new and dislike the old" neuronal set and autism mice.

Social behavior is the basis for the survival and development of

Previous studies have shown that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the brain plays an important regulatory role in social exploration, social fear, and social competition [1-4].

The Institute of Molecular Medicine at the School of Future Technology of Peking University, the IDG McGovern Institute of Brain Sciences, the Joint Center for Life Sciences, the State Key Laboratory of Biofilms Chen Liangyi, the Joint Academy of Military Medical Research Wu Haitao Laboratory, and the Peking University School of Engineering Zhang Jue Laboratory published in the journal Science Advances entitled "Encoding of social novelty by sparse GABAergic neural ensembles.

First, with the help of miniaturized two-photon calcium imaging techniques, the researchers found that during the free social activities of mice, inhibitory interneurons in the PrL brain region had a stronger correlation than excitatory pyramidal neurons

Further, when the researchers conducted two boxes of social behavior observations in mice, they found that meCP2 transgenic autism mice did not have significant defects in social preference, but lost the typical "like the new and dislike the old" type of social novelty

Finally, by systematically analyzing the dynamics of calcium signaling in the PrL cortex encoding "strange" and "familiar" social object information and sparse distribution in the PRL cortical layer of wild-type and MeCP2 transgenic autism mouse models, the researchers found that when wild-type mice socialized with "strange" or "familiar" mice, there were significant differences

In summary, the study found that within the prefrontal cortex of mice, there are a group of sparsely distributed interneuron clusters, which are responsible for encoding the "familiar" and "strange" social object information in social behavior, respectively, and these sparsely distributed neural clusters play an important role in regulating mouse social behavior, especially social novelty behavior, revealing the neural coding mechanism