Microbiota-driven transcriptional changes in prefrontal cortex override genetic differences in social behavior
- Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, United States
- Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinaii, United States
- BERG, United States
- Virginia Commonwealth University, United States
Abstract
Gene-environment interactions impact the development of neuropsychiatric disorders, but the relative contributions are unclear. Here, we identify gut microbiota as sufficient to induce depressive-like behaviors in genetically distinct mouse strains. Daily gavage of saline in non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice induced a social avoidance behavior that was not observed in C57BL/6 mice. This was not observed in NOD animals with depleted microbiota via oral administration of antibiotics. Transfer of intestinal microbiota, including members of the Clostridiales, Lachnospiraceae and Ruminococcaceae, from vehicle-gavaged NOD donors to microbiota-depleted C57BL/6 recipients was sufficient to induce social avoidance and change gene expression and myelination in the prefrontal cortex. Metabolomic analysis identified increased cresol levels in these mice, and exposure of cultured oligodendrocytes to this metabolite prevented myelin gene expression and differentiation. Our results thus demonstrate that the gut microbiota modifies the synthesis of key metabolites affecting gene expression in the prefrontal cortex, thereby modulating social behavior.
Article and author information
Author details
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (#08-0676, #08-0675; LA10-00398; LA12-00193; LA12-00146).
Copyright
© 2016, Gacias et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 10,505
- views
-
- 2,745
- downloads
-
- 230
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Microbiota-driven transcriptional changes in prefrontal cortex override genetic differences in social behavior
eLife 5:e13442.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.13442
Further reading
-
Microbes in the gut influence the social behaviour of mice.
-
- Neuroscience
Learning alters cortical representations and improves perception. Apical tuft dendrites in cortical layer 1, which are unique in their connectivity and biophysical properties, may be a key site of learning-induced plasticity. We used both two-photon and SCAPE microscopy to longitudinally track tuft-wide calcium spikes in apical dendrites of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in barrel cortex as mice learned a tactile behavior. Mice were trained to discriminate two orthogonal directions of whisker stimulation. Reinforcement learning, but not repeated stimulus exposure, enhanced tuft selectivity for both directions equally, even though only one was associated with reward. Selective tufts emerged from initially unresponsive or low-selectivity populations. Animal movement and choice did not account for changes in stimulus selectivity. Enhanced selectivity persisted even after rewards were removed and animals ceased performing the task. We conclude that learning produces long-lasting realignment of apical dendrite tuft responses to behaviorally relevant dimensions of a task.
