Chicago, IL
United States
CON Membership Talk
Thursday, October 15th, 11:00 am
Rachel Moran, PhD
University of Chicago
SBRI J461
“The neurogenomic basis of paternal care”
Abstract: How does evolution build and dismantle complex social behavior? The small stream fishes commonly called darters offer unusual leverage on this question because paternal care evolved independently in multiple lineages and was subsequently lost in others. This natural replication allows us to ask whether gains and losses of care repeatedly involve the same genes, cell populations, and neural circuits. In caregiving species, males defend nest sites before guarding eggs and newly hatched offspring. Nest-site territoriality also occurs in species that never evolved care, raising the possibility that paternal behavior arose through the evolutionary co-option of an ancestral territorial circuit. We test this hypothesis by integrating comparative population genomics with single-nucleus and spatial analyses of the preoptic area, a conserved regulator of vertebrate social behavior. Functional experiments implicate neuropeptide signaling in connecting territoriality to paternal care. They further suggest that secondary loss of care can selectively disrupt behavioral responses while preserving other physiological responses to the same signal, pointing to evolutionary change in central processing rather than wholesale loss of hormone sensitivity. We are identifying the cell populations associated with these transitions and mapping candidate receptor expression and experimentally evoked neural activity across species. A new three-dimensional adult darter brain atlas provides a common anatomical framework for localizing these changes throughout the brain. Together, this work traces the repeated evolution of paternal care from genomic variation to cell populations, neural systems, and behavior.