This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Molly Dickens to work with Dr. Jacques Balthazart at the University of Liege in Belgium.
When an animal encounters a stressor in the wild, the immediate goal is survival. Since escaping a predator, for example, is more an immediate concern than breeding, a quick suppression of reproductive behavior is often thought to be an important adaptive response to an acute stressor. However, when an animal is chronically stressed, this temporary suppression of reproduction can become long-term and detrimental for the animal?s fitness. Chronic stress-related suppression of reproduction is especially problematic for conservation efforts and understanding this suppression is increasingly important as species preservation depends more heavily on stressful human mediation such as captive breeding, reintroduction and translocation. In order to fully understand the chronic stress effects on reproductive behavior, the underlying mechanisms of the adaptive connection between sexual behavior and acute stress must be understood. The PI is addressing this link between acute stress and reproductive behavior utilizing the well-characterized Japanese quail model in collaboration with Dr. Jacques Balthazart, who established the conceptual groundwork for understanding the neurological basis of reproductive behaviors in Japanese quail. In adult male Japanese quail, sexual behaviors are activated rapidly (within a minute) by 17 beta-estradiol (E2) derived from aromatization of testosterone (T) and preliminary data suggest that acute restraint stress or injection of corticosterone (CORT), alters activity of the aromatase enzyme. The goal of the project is to investigate this interaction to determine the mechanistic and functional role of acute stress acting on aromatase-dependent reproductive behaviors. The PI and host are first addressing when this action occurs by testing the latency of changes in aromatase activity following stress, or peripheral injections of stress hormones. In addition, they are testing where this action occurs and how the action is communicated to aromatase-containing brain regions. The PI and host are also evaluating the functionality of the link by testing the hypothesis that if stress alters aromatase activity then changes in aromatase-dependent reproductive behaviors will correspond to these alterations. To test this hypothesis, the PI and host are tracking changes in frequency of copulatory behaviors due to acute stress and hormone injections, determining how the changes depend on degree of stressor severity, and evaluating the role of stress on learning of reproductive behaviors. The PI and host predict that acute stress and the related hormones will alter reproductive behavior through changes in aromatase activity in the preoptic nucleus of male quail. The PI intends to use the knowledge gained from these experiments to eventually investigate how chronic stress leads to long-term suppression of reproductive behavior as it pertains to difficulties with conservation efforts.
