Automated Cell Detection Mapping by Analysis of Immediate Early Genes Reveals Potential Nodes in Aggression-seeking and Sex-seeking Circuits

Abstract

Aggressive and sexual behaviors are both critical to an organism’s survival. While two drastically different behaviors, both carry a rewarding valence. Seeking either behavior recruits traditional reward centers as well as the areas involved in that respective social interaction. Such behaviors also have been shown to be sexually dimorphic. Thus, depending on the actor of social behavior (an animal’s sex) and the context of it (aggression or reproduction), different circuits are recruited. In an operant social interaction task, I present data that show that different actors voluntarily behave in order to engage in aggressive or sexually investigative behavior. Of note, data suggest that proactive aggression-seeking behavior is not as sexually dimorphic as previously considered and that female mice also become motivated to seek out aggressive episodes. This is then supplanted by novel whole brain light sheet microscopy imaging and automated cell detection analyses that present candidate regions for further investigations. Traditional ground truth candidate regions for these behaviors did not come in automated analyses. However, whole brain mapping of areas using immediate early gene expression reveal serotoninergic raphe nuclei as being significantly activated following operant social interaction assays as well as other areas involved in goaldirected behavior that should be considered in future experiments targeting aggressionseeking and sexual-seeking circuits.