Individual behavioral trajectories shape whole-brain connectivity in mice
- TU Dresden, Germany
- King's College London, United Kingdom
Abstract
It is widely assumed that our actions shape our brains and that the resulting connections determine who we are. To test this idea in a reductionist setting, in which genes and environment are controlled, we investigated differences in neuroanatomy and structural covariance by ex vivo structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in mice whose behavioral activity was continuously tracked for 3 months in a large, enriched environment. We confirmed that environmental enrichment increases mouse hippocampal volumes. Stratifying the enriched group according to individual longitudinal behavioral trajectories, however, revealed striking differences in mouse brain structural covariance in continuously highly active mice compared to those whose trajectories showed signs of habituating activity. Network-based statistics identified distinct sub-networks of murine structural covariance underlying these differences in behavioral activity. Together, these results reveal that differentiated behavioral trajectories of mice in an enriched environment are associated with differences in brain connectivity.
Data availability
The structural MR images used in this manuscript are publicly available on the OSF platform (https://osf.io/m7gpd/). The volumetric MRI data are found in Supplementary Files 1 (absolute values) and 2 (relative values). The behavioral data from the cage (animal IDs with time-stamped raw antenna contacts) are assessible at Dryad: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bzkh189ds
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Individual behavioral trajectories shape whole-brain connectivity in miceDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.bzkh189ds.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Helmholtz Association (Basic Funding)
- Anna N Senko
- Gerd Kempermann
Medizinische Fakultät Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden (Basic Funding)
- Anna N Senko
- Gerd Kempermann
Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (88881.129646/2016-01)
- Jadna Bogado Lopes
Joachim Herz Stiftung
- Jadna Bogado Lopes
Medical Research Council (New Investigator Research Grant MR/N025377/1 (AV); Centre Grant MR/N026063/1)
- Anthony C Vernon
TransCampus (TransCampus Research Award)
- Anthony C Vernon
- Gerd Kempermann
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (EH 367/7-1)
- Stefan Ehrlich
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: The experiment was conducted in accordance with the applicable European and national regulations and approved by the local authority (Landesdirektion Sachsen, file number 7/2016 TVT DD24 5131-365-8-SAC). All analyses were performed in a blinded manner.
Copyright
© 2023, Bogado Lopes 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.
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Individual behavioral trajectories shape whole-brain connectivity in mice
eLife 12:e80379.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.80379
Further reading
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When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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