Specific profile of ultrasonic communication in a mouse model of neurodevelopmental disorders

Premoli, Marika; Bonini, Sara Anna; Mastinu, Andrea; Maccarinelli, Giuseppina; Aria, Francesca; Paiardi, Giulia; Memo, Maurizio

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-52378-0

Cited by 32 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…3k). Deficient isolation calling response has been detected in different mouse models of ASD 32 , indicating that insufficient provision of placental ALLO to the fetal brain can lead to a wide array of autistic-like behaviors in the male progeny. Cerebellar MBP correlates with ASD-like symptom severity.…”

Section: Nature Neurosciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Placental endocrine function shapes cerebellar development and social behavior

et al. 2021

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Compromised placental function or premature loss has been linked to diverse neurodevelopmental disorders. Here we show that placenta allopregnanolone (ALLO), a progesterone-derived GABA-A receptor (GABAAR) modulator, reduction alters neurodevelopment in a sex-linked manner. A new conditional mouse model, in which the gene encoding ALLO’s synthetic enzyme (akr1c14) is specifically deleted in trophoblasts, directly demonstrated that placental ALLO insufficiency led to cerebellar white matter abnormalities that correlated with autistic-like behavior only in male offspring. A single injection of ALLO or muscimol, a GABAAR agonist, during late gestation abolished these alterations. Comparison of male and female human preterm infant cerebellum also showed sex-linked myelination marker alteration, suggesting similarities between mouse placental ALLO insufficiency and human preterm brain development. This study reveals a new role for a placental hormone in shaping brain regions and behaviors in a sex-linked manner. Placental hormone replacement might offer novel therapeutic opportunities to prevent later neurobehavioral disorders.

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Section: Nature Neurosciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Placental endocrine function shapes cerebellar development and social behavior

et al. 2021

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“…Spectrograms were generated with Avisoft at a frequency resolution of 488 Hz and a time resolution of 0.512 ms. Signals below 30 kHz were cut to reduce background noise to 0 dB (Premoli et al, 2019 ). For USV detection, an interactive function with section labels was used.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrasonic Vocalizations in Adult C57BL/6J Mice: The Role of Sex Differences and Repeated Testing

Premoli

Petroni

Bulthuis³

et al. 2022

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are a major tool for assessing social communication in laboratory mice during their entire lifespan. At adulthood, male mice preferentially emit USVs toward a female conspecific, while females mostly produce ultrasonic calls when facing an adult intruder of the same sex. Recent studies have developed several sophisticated tools to analyze adult mouse USVs, especially in males, because of the increasing relevance of adult communication for behavioral phenotyping of mouse models of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Little attention has been instead devoted to adult female USVs and impact of sex differences on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of mouse USVs. Most of the studies have also focused on a single testing session, often without concomitant assessment of other social behaviors (e.g., sniffing), so little is still known about the link between USVs and other aspects of social interaction and their stability/variations across multiple encounters. Here, we evaluated the USVs emitted by adult male and female mice during 3 repeated encounters with an unfamiliar female, with equal or different pre-testing isolation periods between sexes. We demonstrated clear sex differences in several USVs' characteristics and other social behaviors, and these were mostly stable across the encounters and independent of pre-testing isolation. The estrous cycle of the tested females exerted quantitative effects on their vocal and non-vocal behaviors, although it did not affect the qualitative composition of ultrasonic calls. Our findings obtained in B6 mice, i.e., the strain most widely used for engineering of transgenic mouse lines, contribute to provide new guidelines for assessing ultrasonic communication in male and female adult mice.

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“…Ultrasonic vocalizations of 40 WT and 39 KO pups at postnatal day (PND) 6, 8 and 12 were recorded after a maternal separation of 3 minutes, as previously described [ 11 , 24 , 25 ]. An ultrasound microphone (CM16/CMPA ultrasound microphone, Avisoft Bioacoustics, Berlin, Germany) sensitive to frequencies of 10–180 kHz and suspended 20 cm above the container that hold the pups, was used.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic classification of mice vocalizations using Machine Learning techniques and Convolutional Neural Networks

et al. 2021

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Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) analysis is a well-recognized tool to investigate animal communication. It can be used for behavioral phenotyping of murine models of different disorders. The USVs are usually recorded with a microphone sensitive to ultrasound frequencies and they are analyzed by specific software. Different calls typologies exist, and each ultrasonic call can be manually classified, but the qualitative analysis is highly time-consuming. Considering this framework, in this work we proposed and evaluated a set of supervised learning methods for automatic USVs classification. This could represent a sustainable procedure to deeply analyze the ultrasonic communication, other than a standardized analysis. We used manually built datasets obtained by segmenting the USVs audio tracks analyzed with the Avisoft software, and then by labelling each of them into 10 representative classes. For the automatic classification task, we designed a Convolutional Neural Network that was trained receiving as input the spectrogram images associated to the segmented audio files. In addition, we also tested some other supervised learning algorithms, such as Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptrons, exploiting informative numerical features extracted from the spectrograms. The performance showed how considering the whole time/frequency information of the spectrogram leads to significantly higher performance than considering a subset of numerical features. In the authors’ opinion, the experimental results may represent a valuable benchmark for future work in this research field.

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Specific profile of ultrasonic communication in a mouse model of neurodevelopmental disorders

Cited by 32 publications

References 57 publications

Placental endocrine function shapes cerebellar development and social behavior

Placental endocrine function shapes cerebellar development and social behavior

Ultrasonic Vocalizations in Adult C57BL/6J Mice: The Role of Sex Differences and Repeated Testing

Automatic classification of mice vocalizations using Machine Learning techniques and Convolutional Neural Networks

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