The Role of Transcription Factor FOXP2 in Tadpole Social Communication
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Communication of hunger during infancy is our first social interaction, laying the foundation for a healthy life by acquiring nutrition and establishing strong social bonds with caregivers. However, the neural basis of neonate social communication is not well understood. Forkhead Box P2 (FOXP2) protein has been implicated in several human communication disorders, including deficits in language through abnormal development of motor neural circuits. This protein has also been linked to communication in songbirds, honeybees, and rodents. I studied the neural basis of neonate communication of nutritional need in Mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) tadpoles. In this species, mothers feed tadpoles unfertilized eggs after the tadpole performs a begging display characterized by vigorously dancing back and forth. Preliminary data suggested that FOXP2-positive neurons are active during these tadpole begging displays. In this study, tadpoles were placed individually in an arena for 30 minutes with either an adult female frog or a novel object as a non-social control. After quantifying the begging behavior displayed by the tadpoles, the tadpole heads were isolated and immunohistochemistry was used to visualize a marker of neural activation (pS6) and FOXP2 in the brain. FOXP2 was widely distributed, with FOXP2-positive cells present in the striatum, hypothalamus, and spinal cord, among other brain regions and the eye. In particular, FOXP2 colocalized with a marker of neural activation predominantly in the cerebellum, indicating that cerebellar FOXP2 may play a role in coordinating begging behavior. Overall, this work suggests a potential conserved role for FOXP2 in social communication and provides important insights into how infants convey hunger.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2021 |
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | May 4, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ludington, Sarah |
|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Biology, 2021 |
| Thesis advisor | O'Connell, Lauren |
| Thesis advisor | Chen, Xiaoke |
Subjects
| Subject | biology |
|---|---|
| Subject | neuroscience |
| Subject | FOXP2 |
| Subject | begging |
| Subject | communication |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-SA).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Ludington, Sarah; O'Connell, Lauren; and Chen, Xiaoke. (2021). The Role of Transcription Factor FOXP2 in Tadpole Social Communication. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/fh900ht2624
Collection
Undergraduate Theses, Department of Biology, 2020-2021
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- sarahl21@stanford.edu
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