Biology subjects

Zala, S. M.

Publications and source records attributed to Zala, S. M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Sex-dependent effects of a gestational ketogenic diet on offspring birth and lifespan

Low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diets (KDs) are used to treat drug-resistant epilepsy, and other potential benefits for treating neurological disorders, metabolic syndrome, and cancer are being explored. In addition to these and other medical applications, KDs have also become popular for rapid weight-loss and enhancing athletic performance. However, the effects of exposing developing offspring to KDs during pregnancy (gestational KD) are poorly understood, and especially their long-term health consequences. In this study, we investigated the effects of a partial gestational KD during the second half of pregnancy in mice and assessed the consequences on the offspring over their entire lifespan compared to offspring exposed to a control diet. We found that a gestational KD significantly reduced dams litter size and litter mass and altered the sex ratio at birth, reducing the proportion of female offspring, which also had lower body mass early in their life. In contrast, male offspring exposed to a gestational KD suffered a significantly reduced lifespan and a late-onset increase in body mass. We found no evidence that our KD diet influenced adult offspring behavior (locomotion, anxiety, depression, circadian rhythms, food and water consumption) or reproduction. These findings highlight the potential of even a partial maternal exposure to a KD to have surprisingly detrimental effects on offspring health and longevity, and thus raising concerns about its use during pregnancy.

physiology↗

bioRxiv2023

Attraction of female house mice to male ultrasonic courtship vocalizations depends on their social experience and estrous

Male house mice (Mus musculus) produce complex ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), especially during courtship and mating. Playback experiments suggest that female attraction towards recordings of male USVs depends on their social experience, paternal exposure, and estrous stage. We conducted a playback experiment with wild-derived female house mice (M. musculus musculus) and compared their attraction to male USVs versus the same recording without USVs (background noise). We tested whether female attraction to USVs is influenced by the following factors: (1) social housing (two versus one female per cage); (2) neonatal paternal exposure (rearing females with versus without father); and (3) sexual receptivity (pro-estrous and estrous stages versus non-receptive metestrous and diestrous stages). We found that females showed a significant attraction to male USVs but only if females were housed with another female. Individually housed females showed the opposite response. We found no evidence that pre-weaning exposure to a father influenced females preferences, whereas sexual receptivity influenced females attraction to male USVs: non-receptive females showed preferences towards male USVs but receptive females did not. Finally, we found that individually housed females were more likely to be in sexually receptive estrous stages than those housed socially, and that attraction to male USVs was most pronounced amongst non-receptive females that were socially housed. Our findings indicate that the attraction of female mice to male USVs depends upon their social experience and estrous stage, though not paternal exposure. They contribute to the growing number of studies showing that social housing and estrous stage influence the behavior of house mice and we show how such unreported variables can contribute to the replication crisis.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Capturing the songs of mice with an improved detection and classification method for ultrasonic vocalizations (BootSnap)

House mice communicate through ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), which are above the range of human hearing (>20 kHz), and several automated methods have been developed for USV detection and classification. Here we evaluate their advantages and disadvantages in a full, systematic comparison. We compared the performance of four detection methods, DeepSqueak (DSQ), MUPET, USVSEG, and the Automatic Mouse Ultrasound Detector (A-MUD). Moreover, we compared these to human-based manual detection (considered as ground truth), and evaluated the inter-observer reliability. All four methods had comparable rates of detection failure, though A-MUD outperformed the others in terms of true positive rates for recordings with low or high signal-to-noise ratios. We also did a systematic comparison of existing classification algorithms, where we found the need to develop a new method for automating the classification of USVs using supervised classification, bootstrapping on Gammatone Spectrograms, and Convolutional Neural Networks algorithms with Snapshot ensemble learning (BootSnap). It successfully classified calls into 12 types, including a new class of false positives used for detection refinement. BootSnap provides enhanced performance compared to state-of-the-art tools, it has an improved generalizability, and it is freely available for scientific use.

neuroscience↗