Brain gene expression syncs between bonded prairie voles
Just as romantic partners exhibit more similar brain waves than do strangers when, say, drawing on an Etch A Sketch toy together, animal pairs also show neural synchrony during social interactions and cooperation tasks.
“Neural synchrony is something that happens in these minute-to-minute engagements that you have with another individual,” says Zoe Donaldson, associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. But over time, too, pairs in a relationship learn to infer what their partner is going to do, she adds.
In prairie voles, at least, that learning process may unfold at the molecular level in the form of “transcriptional synchrony,” according to a preprint Donaldson and her colleagues posted on bioRxiv in November. Prairie voles are socially monogamous, and after two of them bond, gene-expression patterns in their nucleus accumbens—a forebrain region linked to reward and social interaction—start to align.
It remains unclear whether this transcriptional synchrony causes pair bonding or only correlates with it, she adds, but in the meantime, it offers researchers a new place to hunt for the basis of these strong social ties.
