# Cellular, neurogenomic and neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying variation in social behavior

> **NIH NIH R35** · EMORY UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $447,025

## Abstract

Project Summary
The social environment has profound effects on organismal biology, including human health. Individuals vary in
their physiological and behavioral responses to social stimuli, and this variation can manifest as difficulties in
social perception, learning, and behavior in everyday life, or as increased risk for specific neuropsychiatric
symptoms in response to social adversity. Previous work has focused predominantly on discovering the
mechanisms of specific forms of social perception, learning, and behavior, but less attention has been devoted
to understanding how these processes vary among individuals. This proposal leverages the strong genetic,
neurobiological, and behavioral variation within prairie voles to investigate how integrated levels of biological
organization generate individual variation in responses to social stimuli. Briefly, prairie voles exhibit a suite of
unique social behaviors, including pair bonding, consoling, extensive alloparental and biparental care, and
selective aggression toward opposite-sex conspecifics following pair bonding. These behaviors vary among
individuals, and in some instances this behavioral variation has been linked to genetic and neuroendocrine
variation, although the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms are unknown. This proposal has three
main objectives: 1) improve methods for measuring social behaviors in prairie voles; 2) identify cell populations
that respond to specific forms of social stimuli; and 3) determine genetic and neuroendocrine factors underlying
variation in cell type-specific and behavioral responses to social stimuli. These objectives will be accomplished
by integrating behavioral analysis tools, genomics, single cell omics, spatial transcriptomics, and
pharmacological manipulation in a powerful model for social behavioral variation. Completion of these projects
will bridge knowledge gaps between genomics, neuroendocrinology, and circuit neuroscience; address untested
models of social neural processing; and reveal specific genes, molecular systems, and cell populations
underlying social behavioral variation.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10940981
- **Project number:** 1R35GM155357-01
- **Recipient organization:** EMORY UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Zachary V Johnson
- **Activity code:** R35 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $447,025
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-09-01 → 2029-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10940981

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10940981, Cellular, neurogenomic and neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying variation in social behavior (1R35GM155357-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10940981. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*