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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Elizabeth Amadei
BME PhD Defense Presentation
January 26th, 2017 at 12 pm
Emory University, Rollins Research Building, Rm 1052
Thesis Committee Members:
Robert Liu, PhD (Advisor)
Larry Young, PhD (Co-advisor)
Robert Butera, PhD
Joseph Manns, PhD
Samuel Sober, PhD
A dynamic circuit mechanism for social bond formation in female prairie voles
Adult pair bonding involves dramatic changes in the perception and valuation of another individual. One key change is that partners come to reliably activate the brain’s reward system, though the precise neural mechanisms by which partners become rewarding during sociosexual interactions leading to a bond remain unclear. This thesis takes advantage of the prairie vole rodent model of social bonding to record and manipulate a key reward circuit from medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to nucleus accumbens (NAcc) during bond formation. Individual variation in the strength of mPFC-NAcc functional connectivity, particularly after the first mating encounter, predicts how quickly animals begin affiliative huddling with their partner. Rhythmically activating this circuit in a social context without mating biases later preference towards a partner, indicating that this circuit’s activity is not just correlated with how quickly animals become affiliative but causally accelerates it. These results provide the first dynamic view of corticostriatal processes involved in bond formation, revealing how social interactions recruit reward systems to drive changes in affiliative behavior.
