bioRxiv Science⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2025.10.22.684011

Molecular Characterization of Parabrachial Neurons in Xenopus laevis and Silurana tropicalis: Evolutionary Conservation and Sex-Specific Differences

DeNiro, A.·Raghuraman, S.·Chase, K.·Olivera, B.·Yamaguchi, A.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Clawed frogs communicate acoustically to coordinate reproduction, with males producing species-specific advertisement calls to attract females. In Xenopus laevis, males generate fast trills composed of clicks repeated at 60 Hz, a feature absent in both Silurana tropicalis males and X. laevis females, whose calls consist of slower click rates (30 Hz and 7 Hz, respectively). In male X. laevis, fast trills are generated by premotor neurons in the parabrachial nucleus (PBN), known as Fast Trill Neurons (FTNs). We hypothesized that FTNs are unique in male X. laevis, and either absent or molecularly distinct in clawed frogs that do not produce fast trills. To test this, we used constellation pharmacology to profile receptor expression of neurons via intracellular Ca{superscript 2} responses to pharmacological agents in PBN neurons from male X. laevis, male S. tropicalis, and female X. laevis. Surprisingly, we found putative FTNs in all three groups, including those that do not produce fast trills. Furthermore, a similar proportion of FTNs across groups expressed fast-kinetic voltage-gated potassium channels known to support rapid firing, indicating that the presence of these channels does not correlate with the ability to produce fast trills. Instead, some of these channels were more prevalent in males of both species compared to female X. laevis, suggesting a potential sex-specific, non-vocal function. The discovery of FTNs with similar molecular profiles in non-fast-trilling individuals suggests that these neurons are conserved across species and sexes, and may serve other functions. In male X. laevis, FTNs may have been repurposed for fast trill production during speciation. These findings provide new insight into understanding how neural circuits evolve and diversify across species and sexes. Summary statementPremotor vocal neurons share molecular profiles across clawed frogs, despite differences in calls, revealing unexpected conservation and functional divergence of homologous neurons underlying evolution of vocal behavior.

Source connections

Explore related subjects

neurosciencePreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

DeNiro, A., Raghuraman, S., Chase, K., Olivera, B., Yamaguchi, A.. 2025-10-24. Molecular Characterization of Parabrachial Neurons in Xenopus laevis and Silurana tropicalis: Evolutionary Conservation and Sex-Specific Differences. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.10.22.684011

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Same Movements, Different Skills: How Context Shapes Learning in Humans and Neural Networks

What determines whether experiences are integrated into shared representations or split? Motor skill learning offers a revealing test: when two tasks require an identical sequence of movements, both intuition and theory suggest that practice in one should generalize to the other. Yet we find that changing context can make identical movements different skills. In simple recurrent networks trained on the same sequence across contexts, splitting was greatest when strong contextual inputs coincided with a high initial weight scale; neither alone sufficed. Greater representational separation coincided with separate context-specific learning curves. Humans practicing the same finger sequence while alternating between two performance-irrelevant contexts likewise exhibited context-specific curves, rather than the single continuous trajectory observed when practicing in a single context. State-space modeling favored split learning states in humans and very weakly coupled states in the most context-dependent networks. These findings have broader implications for understanding how learning generalizes across contexts.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Postpartum resource scarcity reshapes maternal care, offspring prioritization, and the steroid-sensitive medial preoptic area

Parental care requires balancing offspring needs with environmental constraints, yet how resource scarcity alters the organization of maternal responses remains poorly understood. Here, we examined maternal behavior, offspring prioritization, and steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix organization in postpartum rats exposed to limited bedding and nesting (LBN) or control conditions with ample nesting materials. LBN increased pup-directed and reduced self-directed behaviors but also increased behavioral entropy, a measure of behavioral fragmentation, indicating less predictable caregiving sequences. LBN dams preferentially retrieved male pups first, whereas control dams preferentially retrieved females first. LBN also increased the proportion of pup-investigation time directed toward males compared with controls. In offspring on postnatal day 10, corticosterone was elevated in female but not male LBN pups, a pattern that paralleled the maternal male bias. To identify associated neurobiological changes, we assessed steroid receptors and extracellular matrix organization in the medial preoptic area (mPOA), a key region for maternal behavior. LBN increased numbers of estrogen receptor (ER)- and androgen receptor (AR)-immunoreactive cells, reduced perineuronal net (PNN) abundance, and decreased receptor-positive cell enwrapment. Because PNNs constrain structural plasticity, these findings suggest that the postpartum environment alters the organization of steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix, potentially modulating experience-dependent plasticity in neurosteroid-sensitive circuits. In sum, LBN increases the levels of maternal engagement while reshaping its temporal organization and allocation, accompanied by selective remodeling of steroid-sensitive preoptic architecture. Therefore, maternal adaptation to adversity may be better understood as changes in caregiving allocation strategies rather than a simple gain or loss of maternal care.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

The Computational Grammar of Human Behaviour in a Biological Environment

Human behaviour unfolds as an extended stream of spontaneous actions shaped by environmental demands and the agent's goals. The organisation of these actions, situated between setting abstract goals and concrete movement execution, remains poorly characterised. Here, we introduce DynaClade, an unsupervised temporal action segmentation algorithm for human full-body motion capture data, and apply it to freely moving participants navigating ecologically realistic risky foraging environments in virtual reality. DynaClade identifies discrete actions whose kinematic characteristics and spatial distributions correspond to environmental affordances, supporting the validity of the approach. Among these actions, we discovered a hitherto undescribed movement pattern defined by increased body sway without locomotion. Action sequences were highly non-random and showed clear history dependence beyond first-order Markov structure, most of which was explained by a second-order prediction. This higher-order structure was well captured in a hidden Markov model, in which some of the observed actions were associated with more than one latent state. Each of these latent states corresponded to the same action in a distinct action context. These findings suggest that spontaneous human actions are predominantly selected based on the current action and context, rather than following pre-planned or habitually assembled sequences.

neuroscience↗