Variation in Maternal Care Influences Ventromedial Hypothalamus Activation in the Rat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natural variation in maternal care in the rat is an important source of individual differences in the female neuroendocrine system and sexual behaviours. Thus, females reared by low licking and grooming (LG) mothers are sexually more receptive to males, showing higher lordosis ratings, and are more motivated to mate compared to female offspring of high LG mothers. In the present study, we investigated the effect of natural variations in maternal care on the ventrolateral part of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) cell population and on the reproductive success of the female rat. Immunohistochemistry for phosphorylated oestrogen-receptor (pER) α and progesterone receptor (PR) were used to study the VMHvl of female offspring of high and low LG mothers at pro-oestrus and dioestrus. A second experiment investigated sexual behaviour and the effect of mating on c-Fos expression in the VMHvl of pro-oestrus and ovariectomised high and how female offspring. Lastly, we investigated the maternal effect on the establishment of the progestational state. A greater number of VMHvl pERα immunoreactive cells was found in the pro-oestrous female offspring of low LG mothers and PR was most abundant at pro-oestrus compared to dioestrus in both high and low LG females. Interestingly it is the less receptive high females that show the greater c-Fos expression in the VMH after mating in the pro-oestrous group. The difference in c-Fos expression after mating disappeared when the two groups were ovariectomised and received steroid replacement. Finally, low LG female offspring reached pseudopregnancy more often when receiving only seven intromissions at a 5-min interval compared to high LG females. Lower levels of maternal care may favour the reproductive success of low LG offspring by increasing pERα and oestrogen-dependent lordosis behaviour and lowering c-Fos after mating, resulting in inhibition of termination of oestrus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".