Host: The Japanese Pharmacological Society
Name : The 97th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Pharmacological Society
Number : 97
Location : [in Japanese]
Date : December 14, 2023 - December 16, 2023
Oxytocin (oxt) is required for facilitating mate preferences for familiar individuals in a monogamous rodent (prairie vole), irrespective of sex. While the role of oxt in mate choice is understood in a few monogamous species, its function in non-monogamous species, comprising the vast majority of vertebrate species, remains unclear. To address this issue, we evaluated the involvement of oxt in mate choice in medaka fish (Oryzias latipes), which is a model organism commonly used for molecular genetics. Female medaka prefer to choose familiar males as their mating partner. We generated mutants of the oxt ligand (oxt) and receptor genes (oxtr1, and oxtr2), and revealed that the oxt-oxtr1 signaling pathway was essential for eliciting female mate preference for familiar males. In addition, since our group previously reported that the high pacemaker frequency of terminal nerve GnRH3-neruon (TN-GnRH3 neurons) is required for the female mating preference in medaka, we measured the pacemaker frequency of TN-GnRH3 neurons in mutant females.
Furthermore, RNA-seq analysis revealed that the transcription of three genes that comprise all components of C1q are downregulated in both oxt and oxtr1 mutants, potentially explaining the mutant phenotype.
