ИСТИНА

Aggression is an important component of interactions in animals, that enables competition-based access to group’s valuable resources. Multiple brain regions and circuits involved in aggressive behavior have been identified providing the understanding of local organization of neural ensembles involved in aggression. However, the description of global networks involved in establishment, maintenance, and reversal of social status is waiting to be elucidated. The aim of our work was to reveal and characterize global brain activity patterns underlying different manifestations of aggressive interactions. Male mice were trained in a model of chronic social conflict, and analyzed in several paradigms: (a) aggression (3, 10 or 20 days of agonistic interactions); (b) deprivation (20 days of agonistic interactions followed by 14 days of fight deprivation); (c) inversion (20 days of agonistic interactions followed by interaction in new pairs: winner vs. winner and loser vs. loser). To reveal neuronal activation (using c-Fos as a proxy) brains were processed using iDISCO protocol, postprocessed using ClearMap pipeline, and analyzed to infer the functional connectivity patterns and related neuronal networks. We found that relative positions of the activation patterns in a low dimensional space can be described by two axes: i) social status and ii) experience. We identified functionally related groups of brain regions that show covarying activation upon experimental manipulations. Finally, we identified functional subnetworks of coactivated brain regions by computing pairwise correlations between brain regions for animals with a defined experience and then comparing these subnetworks to the known connectivity patterns.