GSE122947
Behavioral and neurogenomic responses to acoustic and visual sexual cues are correlated in female torrent frogs
Diverse animal species use multimodal communication signals to coordinate reproductive behavior. Despite active research in this field, however, the brain mechanisms underlying multimodal communication remain poorly understood. Although anuran amphibians rely on acoustic communication some anurans like humans and many mammalian species, often produce auditory signals accompanied by conspicuous visual signals (e.g. vocal-sac inflation). In this study, we used video playbacks to determine the role of vocal-sac inflation in little torrent frogs (Amolops torrentis). The results showed that auditory cues (i.e. male advertisement calls) as well as visual cues are attractive to female torrent frogs, although the auditory cue was more attractive than the visual cue. Moreover, females preferred simultaneous bimodal cues to unimodal cues. Then we exposed females to blank, visual, auditory and audiovisual stimuli and analyzed whole brain tissue gene expression changes using RNA-seq. The hierarchical clustering of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) showed that samples from the same behavioral stimulus category were more aggregative than those from different behavioral categories nearly forming a cluster, and implying a strong relationship between neurogenomic states and momentarily expressed sexual signals. We also found that the Gene Ontology (GO) terms and KEGG pathways involved in energy metabolism were mostly enriched in blank contrast versus visual, acoustic or audiovisual stimuli, suggesting that brain energy use plays a key role in the perception of these stimuli. Moreover, analyses of immediate early genes (IEGs) showed that only the c-fos gene was differently expressed in response to different stimuli. These results increase our understanding of how neurogenomic states reflect brain mechanisms mediating female preferences for different sexual cues. Overall design: Brain mRNA profiles of perceiving multimodal cues were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina X-ten PE150