# Mechanisms of experience-dependent plasticity in an innate social behavior circuit

> **NIH NIH F32** · CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · 2024 · $11,656

## Abstract

Project Summary
Many social behaviors, such as defense and aggression, are innate- requiring no prior experience to be
expressed and presumably ‘hardwired’ into neural circuits. Interestingly, however, these ‘hardwired’ behaviors
vary in expression among individuals and can be altered by experience. What are the neural circuits and
mechanisms that support such flexible expression of innate behaviors? The ventrolateral, ventromedial
hypothalamus (VMHvl) controls innate social behaviors including aggression and social defense, but whether
VMHvl encodes individual differences in the expression of these behaviors, or how VMHvl may mediate
experience-dependent behavioral changes is not understood. An experience that exposes individual
differences in innate behavior and induces experience-dependent changes to aggression and defense
behavior is chronic social defeat stress (CDS). CDS induces persistent changes to VMHvl activity- but the cell-
types, circuits, and mechanisms involved in these transformations are unidentified. This proposal will use CDS
to produce a range of social behavior decisions and dissect the cell-types, circuits, and synaptic mechanisms
that mediate these decisions using multiple levels of analysis. This includes in-vivo imaging of individual
neurons to characterize the activity dynamics of VMHvl throughout the course of CDS, electrophysiological
recordings to uncover the cellular and synaptic signatures of CDS in VMHvl circuits, and in-vivo optogenetic
manipulation during behavior to perturb VMHvl CDS-plasticity. This proposal constitutes significant technical
and conceptual training in circuit-mapping, in-vivo recordings, in-vivo circuit manipulation, cell-type and input-
specific synaptic plasticity, and computational and quantitative methods of analysis. Together, completion of
this research will elucidate the experience-dependent transformations to VMHvl circuit dynamics that occur
throughout social stress, and relate these transformations to individual differences in stress outcome.
Examining these relationships will provide insight to the mechanisms underlying stress-plasticity, which provide
insight to stress-related mental health disorders.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10907524
- **Project number:** 5F32MH134439-02
- **Recipient organization:** CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
- **Principal Investigator:** Emma E Boxer
- **Activity code:** F32 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $11,656
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-08-01 → 2024-09-02

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10907524

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10907524, Mechanisms of experience-dependent plasticity in an innate social behavior circuit (5F32MH134439-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10907524. Licensed CC0.

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