# Multiphon imaging for understanding social brain function in tadpoles

> **NIH NIH R34** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2023 · $636,528

## Abstract

Project Summary
Mother-infant bonding is a key relationship that lays a foundation for wellness throughout life. Social
recognition is an important component of this relationship, as infants imprint on the smell of their mothers and
use olfaction to distinguish their mother from others. This behavior is widespread in mammals, although the
complexity of the mammalian brain and paucity of tools and repeated imaging capabilities to study neonate
pups make it difficult to obtain a precise mechanistic understanding of the basic brain mechanisms for
mother-infant bonding and communication in young. Mother-infant recognition and bonding also occur in other
taxa, suggesting there are other species in which to study generalizable neural principles of parent-offspring
interactions. Recently our labs have developed (1) poison frog tadpoles as a model to study social brain
development and (2) multiphoton imaging approaches to enable in vivo recording of pigmented aquatic larvae.
We propose to develop multiphoton in vivo imaging approaches to study the encoding of maternal odors in a
social poison frog tadpole that can distinguish their mother from strangers. We hypothesize that the olfactory
response landscape changes throughout development as tadpoles learn the smell of their mothers. We predict
that a tadpole’s ability to distinguish their mother from strangers coincides with an increase in olfactory cells
that fire with specificity to maternal odors, measured by multiphoton imaging of olfactory system neural activity
repeatedly across development. Prior to these experiments, we will evaluate the performance of various
multiphoton imaging techniques for optically accessible depth inside the brain of multiple species of poison frog
tadpoles with varying levels of pigmentation. We will validate the results with rigorous statistical analyses and
comparison of neural activity data with immunohistological imaging of brain slices and activity-dependent
sequencing of olfactory sensory neurons. Understanding how amphibians learn and encode individual
conspecific identity will either reveal alternative mechanisms of encoding olfactory-based recognition or which
patterns of olfactory encoding are ancestral or generalizable features of vertebrate olfactory processing.
Importantly, our approach will result in the development of multiphoton approaches for whole brain imaging of
pigmented aquatic animals, which is a valuable toolkit of broad use for the neuroscience community.
Successful completion of this project will allow us to obtain proof-of-principle data for proposing in vivo imaging
of tadpole brains throughout development, in a comparative context, and within the framework of ethologically
relevant behaviors, which is crucial for future R01 applications. Furthermore, establishing a recording protocol
in tadpoles will allow for other aspects of neural function in amphibians, a research area that has thus far been
limited due to technological constraints. In summ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10717610
- **Project number:** 1R34NS132841-01
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** NA Ji
- **Activity code:** R34 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $636,528
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2023-09-15 → 2026-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10717610

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10717610, Multiphon imaging for understanding social brain function in tadpoles (1R34NS132841-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10717610. Licensed CC0.

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