https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/catherine-dulac-rewarded-for-study-of-parenting-behavior/Female mice, for example, spontaneously build a nest and start caring for infants, even if they are from another female. Male mice, by contrast, tend to attack infants. Her winning research identified the specific brain cells and neuronal circuits that control these behaviors and questioned the long-held belief that different neuronal circuits develop in male and female brains.
When she joined Harvard as a junior faculty member, Dulac set to work investigating and identifying families of pheromone receptors, the molecules expressed in a specialized sensory tissue of the mouse that detects social cues, called the vomeronasal organ (VNO). By genetically modifying the function of VNO neurons, she discovered that sex-specific social behaviors can be altered. About 10 years ago, these experiments led her to study the hypothalamus, the main brain area downstream of the VNO system that controls sex-specific behaviors.
“It’s not that the circuitry is different; it’s the regulation of that circuitry that’s different,” she said. “The male brain has the same circuitry for parenting behavior that is present in females, and females have circuitry for infanticide that males have. If we kill these neurons in the female brain, they are no longer parental. If we activate them in males, they become parental.”
