Research reveals the neural mechanisms of animal social desire

On October 22, Zhu Yan of the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a research paper entitled Social attraction in Drosophila issioned by the mushroom body and serotonergic system in Nature Communications, which examines fruit flies as models to create new paradigms of social affinity behavior to quantify the intrinsic drivers of animal active social interaction and to reveal the neural mechanisms of animal social desire.
animals actively approach and explore similar natural behaviors, known as social affinity behaviors.
provide the necessary conditions for close social interaction, and to show that animals abandon the will to socialize alone.
social affinity behavior is one of the main internal motivations of animal behavior, which gives individuals in the population more viability than lonely individuals.
, autism, anxiety and other mental illnesses are often accompanied by lack of social affinity or abnormal behavior.
, exploring the neural mechanisms of social affinity will help to better understand and treat such mental illnesses.
, however, due to factors such as animal operability, observability and nervous system complexity, there is still a lack of suitable animal models and behavior paradigms for studying the neurogenes of sociality.
, can fruit flies be used as model organisms to explore the neural mechanisms of social desire? In recent years, Zhu Yan's research group has carried out a series of researches on the neural and molecular mechanisms of fruit fly's social behavior.
researchers developed a high-volume social affinity behavior paradigm for fruit flies as model animals.
data volume analysis, the study is the first to confirm that fruit flies have stable and strong social affinity behavior.
study found that social affinity behavior was significantly reduced only when the visual and olfactory functions of fruit flies were eliminated at the same time.
Using neuron silencing and photogenetic activation, it was found that mushroom body γ neurons (KC) in the central brain region of fruit flies play an important role in the production of social motivation, and activating KC gamma neurons can improve the social affinity behavior of fruit flies, whereinver, inhibiting KC neural neurons inhibits the social affinity behavior of fruit flies.
In order to explore the neural loops that mediat social motivation, the study found that olfactory information was transmitted to KC gamma neurons through α/β neurons (KC alpha/β) in mushroom bodies, while visual information was transmitted to KC gamma neurons through fifth-layer fan-shaped neurons (F5).
the study sheds light on the important neural loops that regulate the social desires of fruit flies, providing a key breakthrough in the in-depth analysis of the neural mechanisms of animal social desires and the understanding of human social-related emotional disorders.
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