Bibliographic record
Abstract
If you want to get hitched for life, you have to make the right moves from the start. For example, prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) form lasting pair-bonds that are initiated when a female displays special interest – known as partner preference – in a male. For the female to form her partner preference she releases two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, that bind to their receptors in the pleasure and reward centre of the brain – the nucleus accumbens. An increase in the expression of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors in the nucleus accumbens helps to kindle a female's affection toward a male, but how their expression is regulated is not known. One method of increasing gene expression is to change the way in which DNA is packaged around the region of the gene that regulates gene expression – a process known as epigenetics. Histone acetylation is a type of epigenetics that unlocks the tight DNA spiral to help activate key genes. This effect can be reversed by deacetylating the histones to deactivate genes. Postdoctoral researcher Hui Wang and a team of neuroscientists at Florida State University, USA, set about testing whether epigenetics are involved in partner preference formation in female prairie voles.Using a drug that promotes gene activation by preventing histone deacetylation – called trichostatin A (TSA) – Wang and colleagues injected the drug into the brains of female voles and then housed each female with a male for 6 h to find out how TSA affected the female's partner preference. Normally, a female will not develop a preference for a male over such a short period of time. However, Wang and colleagues found that injected females did favour their partner male over a stranger – indicating that blocking histone deacetylation and increasing histone acetylation permitted the females to form a partner preference.Wang and colleagues then measured changes in gene and protein expression of the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, as well as the amount of histone acetylation in the regulatory regions of these two genes. They found that the TSA-injected females had an increase in oxytocin and vasopressin receptor expression in the nucleus accumbens, likely driven by a measured increase in histone acetylation in the regions of those genes that regulate their expression.Next, the team injected new females with TSA but this time they also injected some of these females with additional drugs, one of which blocked the oxytocin receptor and the other the vasopressin receptor, to find out whether this would prevent partner preference formation induced by TSA. They found that females given TSA in combination with either of the receptor blockers did not favour their partner male over a stranger, meaning that partner preference was not formed.Having used TSA and other drugs to show that the expression of the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors in the brain could be epigenetically regulated, Wang and colleagues decided to find out whether the animals use this epigenetic mechanism in practice. To do this, the team housed a new set of uninjected females individually with a male for 24 h and then measured the gene and protein expression of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors in the females' brains, and the amount of histone acetylation in the genes' regulatory regions. They found that the expression of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors in the nucleus accumbens increased, and that the activation of these two genes is achieved by histone acetylation. So, Wang and colleagues have shown that partner preference is epigenetically driven in the pleasure and reward center of the brain in female prairie voles, improving our understanding of the neurobiology of social affiliation as well as possibly unearthing the secret behind Cupid's magic arrows!
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.087 | 0.031 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".