Integrative biology and genomics of behaviour.

Informations: Aubin-Horth Laboratory

When an individual rises in a dominance hierarchy of a social group, he often becomes aggressive and ready to do anything to reproduce. We know a lot about the behavioural, morphological, physiological and hormonal changes that must take place for this individual to gain a dominant status and a chance at reproducing. But what is happening in its brain, the control centre of all these drastic changes?

Our laboratory aims at understanding what are the underlying molecular and hormonal causes and consequences of among-individual variation in behaviour in vertebrates. We are particularly interested in dominance behaviour, in the stress response and temperament in general, as well as in reproductive tactics. In all cases, we favour an integrative approach by linking data from different levels of organization of the same individual: gene expression in the brain (quantitative Real-Time PCR, microarrays), hormones, physiology and behaviour. Furthermore, we complement our approach by perturbing candidate genes or the external environment to dissect the molecular causes and consequences of behavioural variation and to determine the molecular networks that underlie behavioural differences. For example, we compare dominant and subordinate individuals, but also individuals that are in the process of rising or falling in dominance. We also compare control individuals to individuals for whom we have manipulated a key hormone, for example testosterone, to study how this perturbation affects not only behaviour, but also other hormones and gene expression. Our model system is the threespine stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus, a small fish studied in behavioural biology, which can be kept easily in the lab and whose genome is sequenced.

BIO-2006 : Physiologie animale comparée II

BIO-2909 : Élément de physiologie humaine