Z01 HD 001123 LCE and Z01 HD 001124 LCE are companion projects that together investigate auditory communication in primates. The overall goal of these studies is to provide a comprehensive understanding of primate auditory communication in terms of development, neural mechanisms, endocrine factors, and social context. Two non-human primates, the squirrel monkey and common marmoset, are the main subjects of study, with additional data collected from other species where appropriate. Prior work in this project using brain lesioning methodology has shown that production of sounds that are the functional and acoustic equivalents of cry sounds in human infants are mediated by limbic cortex located along the anterior midline of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, and that single neural elements in the auditory cortex (superior temporal gyrus) are particularly responsive to subtle differences in the acoustic structure of species-specific vocalizations, suggesting an important role in mediating individual differences (vocal signatures). A new initiative in the laboratory employs immunocytochemistry to identify the neurons activated in crying infants and in adults hearing infant cries. A study of c-fos expression in infant marmoset monkey brains was conducted. The paradigm involved separating individuals for 30 minutes, recording the cry sounds made during this separation, returning them to their home cage for 1 hour, then euthanizing them and processing their fixed brains for Fos using immunocytochemistry. Of particular note is that regions found to be strongly labeled in adult monkeys were also strongly labeled in infants. In particular, the anterior cingulate gyrus, midline cortex in the frontal lobe, had numerous labelled cells even at 1 month of age. These results indicate that c-fos immunocytochemistry is a method that can demonstrate functional involvement of brain regions also active in adults using the same behavioral paradigm. A brain atlas developed in this laboratory in collaboration with investigators in the NINDS Laboratory of Functional and Metabolic Imaging provided the means to identify the specific structures containing large numbers of Fos. A study begun last year used similar methods to identify the neurons activated in adult listeners upon hearing infant cries. Analysis of 3 male brains indicates that structures associated with the limbic system of MacLean, including the anterior cingulate gyrus, gyrus rectus, septum, amygdala and hippocampus, all have significant numbers of Fos-labeled cells. In addition, the superior temporal gyrus, where the auditory cortex is located, is richly labeled. Using MRI images from a female marmoset, structures identified and labeled in the lab's histological brain atlas were also identified in the MRI images (closely matched to the plates from the histological atlas), making it possible to more accurately identify structures in the marmoset brain in functional MRI studies. A new study this year was to add the common marmoset to a comparative primate transcriptome project. The long-term goal is to compare gene expression in specific brain regions of several primate species. Our contribution has been to provide the brains of 8 marmosets, 4 males and 4 females. With the assistance of the brain atlas developed in our laboratory, more than 10 specific brain regions were disssected from each brain and frozen. Subsequent analysis will extract RNA from each region and the specific RNA sequences will be identified.
| Newman, John D; Kenkel, William M; Aronoff, Emily C et al. (2009) A combined histological and MRI brain atlas of the common marmoset monkey, Callithrix jacchus. Brain Res Rev 62:1-18 |
| Bock, Nicholas A; Paiva, Fernando F; Nascimento, George C et al. (2008) Cerebrospinal fluid to brain transport of manganese in a non-human primate revealed by MRI. Brain Res 1198:160-70 |
