Author Response: Sexual coordination in a whole-brain map of prairie vole pair bonding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual bonds are central to the social lives of many species, including humans, and monogamous prairie voles have become the predominant model for investigating such attachments.We developed an automated whole-brain mapping pipeline to identify brain circuits underlying pair-bonding behavior.We identified bonding-related c-Fos induction in 68 brain regions clustered in seven major brain-wide neuronal circuits.These circuits include known regulators of bonding, such as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, paraventricular hypothalamus, ventral pallidum, and prefrontal cortex.They also include brain regions previously unknown to shape bonding, such as ventromedial hypothalamus, medial preoptic area, and the medial amygdala, but that play essential roles in bonding-relevant processes, such as sexual behavior, social reward, and territorial aggression.Contrary to some hypotheses, we found that circuits active during mating and bonding were largely sexually monomorphic.Moreover, c-Fos induction across regions was strikingly consistent between members of a pair, with activity best predicted by rates of ejaculation.A novel cluster of regions centered in the amygdala remained coordinated after bonds had formed, suggesting novel substrates for bond maintenance.Our tools and results provide an unprecedented resource for elucidating the networks that translate sexual experience into an enduring bond. eLife assessmentThis is an important study using 3D mapping of neuronal activation throughout the brain after pairbonding in the monogamous vole, which can be broadly applied to other species and behaviors.The authors provide compelling evidence that there is some synchrony between male and female partners that have formed a pair bond, the strength of which is based on the number of ejaculations received by the female.Same-sex pairs also form a pair bond and were found to have activation in the same brain regions as mixed sex couples.An overall low level of sex differences in the degree and location of brain activation was observed, which was unexpected.This work will be of interest to those interested in social behavior and its neural mechanisms, or brain systems or behavior more broadly.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | high |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | high |
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 | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.093 | 0.010 |
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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".