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| Poster #131 Contribution of Olfactory-driven Oscillations to Interbrain Synchrony in Socially Interacting Mice |
| Geronimo Velazquez-Hernandez, Brittany Correia Chapman, Janardhan Bhattarai, Juee Naik, Delaney McKinstry, Yingqi Wang, Minghong Ma Department of Neuroscience, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States |
Social interaction is essential for the well-being of individuals as well as for the functioning of societies. Social impairment manifests in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. Social interaction involves extensive information exchange, behavioral coordination, and shared cognitive states between individuals. Remarkably, socially interacting brains exhibit some degree of coordination and synchronization, termed “interbrain synchrony”, which may encode socially relevant information and enhance social interaction. Interbrain synchrony has been observed in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a key hub in social cognition. Meanwhile, respiration-entrained oscillations in the olfactory system are increasingly recognized as a powerful coordinator of neuronal activity in many brain areas, including the mPFC. However, the role of respiratory rhythms has not been considered in interbrain synchrony during social interaction. Here, we test the hypothesis that coordinated olfactory inputs among individuals in social settings contribute to interbrain synchrony via an olfactory-mPFC circuit. Local field potentials (LFPs) from the mPFC and olfactory bulb (OB) were simultaneously recorded from freely behaving pairs of mice. Neural synchrony was assessed by analyzing the correlation of the power spectrum within and between animals. The OBs of socially interacting mice showed increased synchrony relative to mice alone or not interacting, suggesting concurrently increased breathing frequencies. This pattern holds when evaluating the synchrony between mPFCs, and between the OB and mPFC within the same animal. We will investigate the interbrain synchrony profiles in socially impaired mice in the near future. |