INTEGRATING NEURAL AND GENE REGULATORY NETWORKS TO UNDERSTAND BEHAVIORAL EVOLUTION

Understanding the origin and maintenance of behavioral diversity is a fundamental problem. Why is there so much variation in the ways that individual animals make a living and interact with one another and their environments? Studies in Professor Bell’s lab have shown that some individual stickleback fish males are attentive fathers, caring for their offspring for prolonged periods, while others remove their offspring from the nest and leave them to fend for themselves. Bell’s team has made progress toward understanding this behavioral variation by, for example, comparing the genes expressed in the brain, patterns of neural activity, and the genomes of these different behavioral strategies. However, it has become clear that while they can glean interesting insights from analysis at the neural and molecular level, they lack a conceptual framework or analytic strategy for integrating them together. Moreover, the disconnect between the neural and molecular is not just a problem for this particular study, but reflects a much larger and more fundamental chasm. Biological networks are one way to potentially bridge this divide because networks are a useful heuristic for conceptualizing the complex interactions among neurons within the connectome and among genes within gene regulatory networks. The overall premise of this application is that new insights will result from integrating neuronal and gene regulatory networks, and this integration will be facilitated by new tools that are increasingly available for use in diverse species. As a CAS fellow, Professor Bell will (1) develop a conceptual framework which integrates neural and gene regulatory networks to gain insights into fundamental questions about the origin and maintenance of behavioral diversity; (2) articulate the evolutionary insights that can come from single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data; and (3) apply this conceptual framework to understand the origin of behavioral variation in sticklebacks.