Dr. Jenny Chen
@jjennychenn
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#NIHMOSAIC K99/R00 scholar using comparative genomics to understand the molecular basis of innate mating & parenting behavior in deer mice 🧬 🐭
Cambridge, MA
Joined April 2013
Super excited to share my postdoc work investigating how mating and parental behaviors evolve using wild species of mice combined with single nucleus RNA-sequencing of the hypothalamus 🐭🧠🧬! https://t.co/tYSFCfOqwP
biorxiv.org
Genetic variation is known to contribute to the variation of animal social behavior, but the molecular mechanisms that lead to behavioral differences are still not fully understood. Here, we invest...
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A nice write up of my work + others using Peros to study genetic basis of behaviors!
A peculiar group of wild mice is helping researchers decode diverse behaviors — @bendesky, Wendy Saltzman, and @jjennychenn study these animals’ brain to study parenting. https://t.co/F9r5FxDjGL
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super cool work looking at the behavior of tens of thousands of random intron sequences!
My PhD work is live on bioRxiv today! :)
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this sounds like a dream job
🚨 student job alert 🚨 Excited to post my first ad for the lab looking for a Research Specialist @PennSAS ( RA or Lab manager open to both profiles). Neuro of flexible behaviors, play in the lab, wild rodents in Panama! Please share! RT https://t.co/tUU7olraNw and
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the selection happens on the phenotype (e.g. cells, proteins, etc) and that results in signatures we can see in the genes. signed, a genes and cell person
There's still a cold war in biology, dividing the genes and the cells people. The genes people argue that genes are the primary unit of selection; the cells people see cells (which include genes) as the basic unit of life. We need a conference to finally resolve this conflict!
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Meanwhile, this project was my first foray into wet lab, so I want to give special thanks to @GraveNeurosis, @harris_kaplan & Chuck Vanderburg for teaching me lots of wet lab skills; and to Chris & Phoebe for being amazing help while I was busy with my own parenting behaviors.
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In sum, our findings suggest intriguing correlations between neuronal cell abundances, gene expression, and behavior. We’re now doing lots of fun follow up experiments to more fully understand how these observations are causally linked - stay tuned!
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This suggests that neuropeptides are crucial for sex-specific behaviors, but also that their expression levels are evolutionarily labile, making them useful “dials” for generating species-specific variation in sex-biased behaviors
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🚨BONUS 🚨 A last bit I found interesting was that sex-biased genes were *overwhelmingly* neuropeptides in both species. BUT, the identity of those neuropeptides was *not* conserved across species.
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Finally, we found 2 Esr1-expressing cell types that are sex-biased in their abundance and enriched for sex-biased genes in both the promiscuous and monogamous species. This conservation of sexual dimorphism suggest these cell types may be critical for sex-specific behaviors
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Our data suggests that an increase in the number of galanin neurons could potentially underlie the increase of parental care behavior in our monogamous species.
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Second, we found that the monogamous species had significantly more galanin neurons than the promiscuous species! MPOA galanin neurons were first shown to control parenting behavior in Mus by @DulacLab and have since been shown to be important for parenting even in frogs and fish
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This is exciting bc morphological traits like coloration + body size are well known to be less sexually dimorphic in monogamous animals. But this is, to our knowledge, the first genome-wide observation of a molecular trait being less sexually dimorphic in a monogamous species!
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Our snRNA-seq data revealed three major findings. First, when we looked at sex differences in the two species, we were surprised to find the monogamous species had drastically fewer sex-biased genes in the MPOA compared to the promiscuous species!
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As a technical aside, bc our species are outbred, we developed an approach where samples from each sex/species were POOLED into a single snRNA-seq run, and computationally demultiplexed using SNPs. This drastically improved our power to detect differences across sex and species
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We thought that changes in neuronal cell type abundances and gene expression could be important. So we performed snRNA-seq on males and females of both species, focusing on the medial preoptic area (MPOA) of the hypothalamus - an area critical to the control of social behavior
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In the monogamous P. polionotus, moms + dads take care of offspring 👨👩👧; in the promiscuous P. maniculatus, only moms provide care 👩👧. @bendesky et al showed these differences are heritable. But what are the genes involved and by which molecular mechanisms do they alter behavior?
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How do genes evolve to diversify behavior? It's a hard question to ask in mammals because mammals have LOTS of genes and many complex behaviors. So we took advantage of 2 Peromyscus species that are only ~2M years diverged yet have very different mating and parenting behaviors
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saw at least 4 needles while walking my 3yo to daycare today by the Beacon St. Star Market underpass 😥. Called @SomervillePD and asked them to clean it up. Needles still there on our walk home 8hrs later 😥😥😥. @311Somerville
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Excited to see this out!
Excited to share our new work (with @KumareshSpikes): "Protein Sequence Domain Annotation using Language Models" (PSALM) https://t.co/80WSlT0uMp
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