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Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior
Early-life experiences have strong and long-lasting consequences for behavior in a surprising diversity of animals. Determining which environmental inputs cause behavioral change, how this information becomes neurobiologically encoded, and the functional consequences of these changes remain fundamen...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8097038/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33967715 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.660464 |
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author | Westwick, Rebecca R. Rittschof, Clare C. |
author_facet | Westwick, Rebecca R. Rittschof, Clare C. |
author_sort | Westwick, Rebecca R. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Early-life experiences have strong and long-lasting consequences for behavior in a surprising diversity of animals. Determining which environmental inputs cause behavioral change, how this information becomes neurobiologically encoded, and the functional consequences of these changes remain fundamental puzzles relevant to diverse fields from evolutionary biology to the health sciences. Here we explore how insects provide unique opportunities for comparative study of developmental behavioral plasticity. Insects have sophisticated behavior and cognitive abilities, and they are frequently studied in their natural environments, which provides an ecological and adaptive perspective that is often more limited in lab-based vertebrate models. A range of cues, from relatively simple cues like temperature to complex social information, influence insect behavior. This variety provides experimentally tractable opportunities to study diverse neural plasticity mechanisms. Insects also have a wide range of neurodevelopmental trajectories while sharing many developmental plasticity mechanisms with vertebrates. In addition, some insects retain only subsets of their juvenile neuronal population in adulthood, narrowing the targets for detailed study of cellular plasticity mechanisms. Insects and vertebrates share many of the same knowledge gaps pertaining to developmental behavioral plasticity. Combined with the extensive study of insect behavior under natural conditions and their experimental tractability, insect systems may be uniquely qualified to address some of the biggest unanswered questions in this field. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8097038 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-80970382021-05-06 Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior Westwick, Rebecca R. Rittschof, Clare C. Front Behav Neurosci Neuroscience Early-life experiences have strong and long-lasting consequences for behavior in a surprising diversity of animals. Determining which environmental inputs cause behavioral change, how this information becomes neurobiologically encoded, and the functional consequences of these changes remain fundamental puzzles relevant to diverse fields from evolutionary biology to the health sciences. Here we explore how insects provide unique opportunities for comparative study of developmental behavioral plasticity. Insects have sophisticated behavior and cognitive abilities, and they are frequently studied in their natural environments, which provides an ecological and adaptive perspective that is often more limited in lab-based vertebrate models. A range of cues, from relatively simple cues like temperature to complex social information, influence insect behavior. This variety provides experimentally tractable opportunities to study diverse neural plasticity mechanisms. Insects also have a wide range of neurodevelopmental trajectories while sharing many developmental plasticity mechanisms with vertebrates. In addition, some insects retain only subsets of their juvenile neuronal population in adulthood, narrowing the targets for detailed study of cellular plasticity mechanisms. Insects and vertebrates share many of the same knowledge gaps pertaining to developmental behavioral plasticity. Combined with the extensive study of insect behavior under natural conditions and their experimental tractability, insect systems may be uniquely qualified to address some of the biggest unanswered questions in this field. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-04-21 /pmc/articles/PMC8097038/ /pubmed/33967715 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.660464 Text en Copyright © 2021 Westwick and Rittschof. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Westwick, Rebecca R. Rittschof, Clare C. Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior |
title | Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior |
title_full | Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior |
title_fullStr | Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior |
title_full_unstemmed | Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior |
title_short | Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior |
title_sort | insects provide unique systems to investigate how early-life experience alters the brain and behavior |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8097038/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33967715 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.660464 |
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