2/26, LSBM Friday Seminar Series #4, Tomomi Karigo, Neuroscience

Speaker: Tomomi Karigo

Date: Feb 26th (Fri), 1:00pm.

Title: Hypothalamic control of internal states underlying social behaviors

LSBM Friday Seminar Series #4, Tomomi Karigo, Neuroscience

We are very excited to announce we are hosting a research seminar by Dr. Tomomi Karigo on the neurological basis for internal states. We look forward to learning the advance in the field of neuroscience and envisioning its future through discussions. Attendee will be LSBM/K2CORE members and their friends.Presenter: Tomomi Karigo (California Institute of Technology, Division of Biology & Biological Engineering)

Date: Feb 26th (Fri), 1:00pm.

Title: Hypothalamic control of internal states underlying social behaviors

Abstract:
Social interactions such as mating and fighting are driven by internal emotional states. How can we study the internal states of an animal when it cannot tell us its subjective feelings? Especially when the meaning of the animal’s behaviors is not clear to us, can we understand the underlying internal states of the animal? In this talk, I will introduce our recent work in which we used male mounting behavior in mice as an example to understand the underlying internal state of the animals. In many animal species, males exhibit mounting behavior toward females as part of the mating behavior repertoire. Interestingly, males also frequently show mounting behavior toward other males of the same species. It is not clear what the underlying motivation is - whether it is reproductive in nature or something distinct. Through detailed analysis of video and audio recordings during social interactions, we found that while male-directed and female-directed mounting behaviors are motorically similar, they can be distinguished by both the presence of ultrasonic vocalization during female-directed mounting (reproductive mounting) and the display of aggression following male-directed mounting (aggressive mounting). Using optogenetics, we further identified genetically defined neural populations located in the medial preoptic area (MPOA) that mediate reproductive mounting and the ventrolateral ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) that mediate aggressive mounting. In vivo microendocsopic imaging in MPOA and VMHvl revealed distinct neural ensembles that mainly encode either a reproductive or an aggressive state during which male or female directed mounting occurs. Together, these findings demonstrated that internal states are represented in the hypothalamus and that motorically similar behaviors exhibited under different contexts may reflect distinct internal states.