13:30 - 15:30
Sat-S13
Goethe Hall
Chair/s:
Cinzia Cecchetto
Across species, chemosensation is the result of complex interactions between the environment, the sensory organs, and the neural system. As a result even minimal changes in the external or internal milieu can perturb chemosensory experience. Here we showcase a group of young, promising scientists who are uncovering the effect of different perturbations on the chemosensation of their respective model systems.
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Boosting memory recall of volatile social odors with oxytocin
Sat-S13-002
Presented by: Renée Hartig
Renée Hartig 1, 2, David Wolf 1, 2, Wolfgang Kelsch 1, 2
1 Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, 2 Central Institute of Mental Health, Heidelberg University, Germany
The formation of social structures relies upon the recognition of specific individuals. Recognizing familiar individuals plays an essential role, yet it remains relatively unclear how such familiarity memory is encoded in the adult brain. Social interactions are multi-sensory in nature and many species sample volatile odors emitted by conspecifics. We show here that volatile odors emitted by mice are sufficient to recognize familiar conspecifics following initial exploration. Ultra-high field awake fMRI reveals a network differentiating odors from familiar and unknowns. From this, a key relationship was identified for the processing of social orders, involving recurrent network activity between the anterior olfactory nucleus and hippocampus after appetitive social interactions (with a juvenile) and optogenetically stimulated oxytocin release in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus. The familiarity of volatile social odors differentiated from unfamiliar odors in the olfactory bulb and striatum, overlapping with paralimbic coactivations recruited by evoked oxytocin release. Boosted oxytocin release during initial exploration produces sustained global network states with embedded strengthened familiarity memory traces. Such formation of familiarity traces requires intact oxytocin receptors in the olfactory cortex. In summary, oxytocin enables formation of distributed memory traces of learned familiarity that can be retrieved from distant chemosensory signals.
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