10:00 - 12:00
Sat-S12
Hahn Lecture Hall
Chair/s:
Daniel Muench, Katrin Vogt
Chemosensation is essential for navigating the environment, finding food sources, forming groups, or detecting mating partners. To execute the most efficient and appropriate behavior, however, animals need to process chemosensory inputs in a context dependent way. How chemosensory processing gets modulated by external and internal information (e.g. concurrent sensory stimuli or internal states) to result in an adapted behavioral response, will be the topic of this symposium. This symposium is comprised of a selection of speakers working with a diverse set of model organisms, which all show flexible behaviors towards chemosensory cues.
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State-dependent modulation of odor valence and social behavior via the main olfactory pathway
Sat-S12-001
Presented by: Annika Cichy
Annika Cichy 1, 5, 7, Adam Dewan 1, 6, 7, Jingji Zhang 1, Sarah Kaye 1, Tiffany Teng 1, Kassandra Blanchard 1, Paul Feinstein 3, 4, Thomas Bozza 1, 2
1 Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA, 2 Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, Northwestern University, Evanston IL 60208, USA, 3 Department of Biological Sciences, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, NY 10065, USA, 4 The Graduate Center Programs in Biochemistry, Biology and CUNY Neuroscience Collaborative, New York, NY 10016, USA, 5 Present address: Institute of Physiology II, University of Bonn, 53115 Bonn, Germany, 6 Present address: Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA, 7 Authors contributed equally to this work
Mammalian social behaviors such as aggression are influenced by conspecific chemical cues, typically low volatility molecules that activate the vomeronasal pathway. While the main olfactory system is required for proper social behaviors, the molecular basis for how social cues are detected via the main olfactory pathway of mammals is not well-characterized. Trimethylamine is a volatile, sex-specific chemical that is enriched in adult male mouse urine and specifically activates main olfactory sensory neurons that express trace amine-associated receptor 5 (TAAR5). Here we show that trimethylamine, acting via TAAR5, elicits state-dependent attraction or aversion in male and female mice depending on neuroendocrine or social status. Genetic knockout of TAAR5 abolishes valence responses in both sexes and significantly reduces aggression-related behaviors in males, while adding trimethylamine augments aggressive behavior towards juvenile males. We further show that transgenic expression of TAAR5 specifically in olfactory sensory neurons rescues aggressive behaviors in knockout mice, despite extensive remapping of TAAR5 projections to the olfactory bulb. Our results show that state-dependent behavioral responses to a volatile social cue are mediated via the main olfactory pathway, identify a specific main olfactory input (TAAR5) as necessary for intermale aggression, and reveal that apparently innate behavioral responses are independent of patterned glomerular input to the olfactory bulb.

This work was supported by grants from NIH/NIDCD, R21DC018905 (A.C.).

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