Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Maria Florencia Scaia | Email: mflorenciascaia@gmail.com
Maria Florencia Scaia1°2°, Florian Reichmann3°, Will Norton4°, Matt Parker3°
1° IFIBYNE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires (Argentina)
2° Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, School of Biosciences, University of Surrey (UK)
3° Department of Pharmacology, Medical University of Graz (Austria)
4° Department of Genetics and Genome Biology, University of Leicester (UK)
Emotional social contagion can be described as the ability to match the emotional state of another individual. Recent evidence suggests that certain mechanisms of emotional contagion in mammals, such as the role of oxytocin, are conserved in zebrafish. Research using social fear contagion protocols rules out the hypothesis that social transmission of fear in zebrafish merely relies on motor imitation, but rather on emotion discrimination. While this has been assessed in mutants with impaired oxytocinergic pathway, social fear transmission in other zebrafish strains with altered sociality remains unexplored. To tackle this, we assessed a protocol of social transmission of fear in ednraa-/- mutants, which are more aggressive and less cohesive than wild-types, and lrrtm4 mutants, showing the opposite pattern of behavior (“unfriendly” and “friendly” strains, respectively). To assess how impaired sociality might affect social contagion, we exposed fish from each strain to alarm substances or water influx, and we quantified individual behavior in time series of exposed and observer fish. Moreover, in order to explore how different social phenotypes can be affected by a social challenge, we isolated fish from both strains for 7 days and we compared brain transcriptome by RNAseq in isolated and control ednraa-/, lrrtm4 and AB fish. Our study will help to understand whether different social phenotypes in zebrafish might influence social transmission of fear and brain transcriptome.