A SYSTEMS BIOLOGY APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE PROGRAMMING OF MOTHER-OFFSPRING INTERACTIONS

Maternal behaviour is one of the most important features of the female mammal, ensuring the appropriatepostnatal development and survival of her offspring. Conversely, aberrant maternal care can result in aggressionand the killing of young while young exposed to poor maternal care early in life can exhibit life long changes intheir behaviour, a feature also reported in humans. This project seeks to employ a systems biology approach to explore the mechanisms that induce maternal behaviour and then use this information to make further predictions that will then be tested in vivo. The work will be done using a novel model in which maternal behaviour is genetically mis-programmed. Data on behaviour, biochemistry and the transcriptome of key brain regions has been gathered. The student will interrogate the transcriptomic data to identify the neural systems underpinning maternal responses in the context of the phenotypes we have identified. They will use this information to predict behaviours and ask whether these behaviours are consistent with the data available to support their predictions. Once this phase of the work is complete, the student will apply their bioinformatics approach to a second model, as yet uncharacterised, initially generating RNAseq data and integrating this to
direct the behavioural characterisation of the new model based on just the transcriptomic data. They will then validate their predictions in vivo.
Technical skills and training: This project will combine experimental work (wet lab training) with the integration, interrogation and analysis of large transcriptomic datasets (advanced computational training) to provide the student with an advantageous skill set appropriate to 21st century science.