Abstract

Prosocial behavior is hypothesized to have evolutionary roots in offspring care, yet whether shared neural substrates drive adult-directed prosociality remains largely unclear. By investigating these behaviors in mice, we demonstrate that higher levels of parenting correlate with increased prosocial allogrooming toward stressed adults. We identify the medial preoptic area (MPOA), which is a key brain region involved in parenting, as a bidirectional regulator of this behavior. Using activity-dependent labeling, we reveal that allogrooming and parenting recruit partially overlapping MPOA neuronal ensembles, share an MPOA-to-VTA pathway, and require dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. These MPOA ensembles are functionally interdependent for both behaviors. It suggest that neural systems evolved for offspring care provided a scaffold for the emergence of broader adult prosocial support. Furthermore, we show that mice detect unresponsive states in conspecifics and exhibit distinct head-directed rescue actions to facilitate recovery. Neural activity in the medial amygdala encodes the states of social partners and regulates these corresponding prosocial responses. Together, these paradigms provide a new framework for dissecting the neural mechanisms underlying prosocial responses to diverse adverse states in others.

Biography

Fangmiao Sun, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She received her B.S. in Biotechnology from the Beijing Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in Physiology from Peking University. During her doctoral studies, she developed genetically encoded fluorescent sensors (GRAB_DA sensors) to monitor dopamine dynamics across multiple model organisms. Her current research focuses on elucidating the neural mechanisms and evolutionary roots underlying prosocial behaviors.