Meningeal immune signaling supports emotional adaptation following threat
Social creatures must attend to threat signals from conspecifics and respond appropriately, both behaviorally and physiologically. In this work, we show a threat-sensitive immune signaling that orchestrates psychological processes and is amenable to social modulation. Repeated encounters with socially-cued threats triggered neutrophil priming preferentially in males. Meningeal niche-specific neutrophil activity was correlated with attenuated defensive responses to cues. The neutrophil-specific membrane protein CD177 responded to threat-predicting social cues, and its genetic ablation abrogated male behavioral phenotypes. Neutrophil CD177 signaling facilitated optimal meningeal IFN-? production, which blunted neural response to threatening stimuli by enhancing intrinsic GABAergic inhibition within the prelimbic cortex. Initiation of meningeal neutrophil-mediated IFN-? signaling was sensitized by negative emotional states and governed by socially dependent androgen release. This male-biased hormone/neutrophil regulatory axis is seemingly conserved in humans. Our findings provide insights into how immune responses influence behavioral responses to threats, suggesting a possible neuroimmune basis of emotional regulation. Overall design: To confirm the sex differences in the state of meningeal neutrophils (MNs) following social threat exposure, we isolated neutrophils from the dura mater tissues of male and female mice after exposure for RNA sequencing.