Prairie voles without oxytocin receptors still formed lifelong bonds and had kids, a new study finds, suggesting its effect on social behaviors isn't so clear.
A team of researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere have long been interested in studying prairie voles, particularly as a model for better understanding social behavior in humans. More recently, they’ve begun to develop techniques for selectively editing the genes of these animals using CRISPR, a practice commonly used for studying mice and other animals.
As part of their initial tests of this technology, they decided to see what would happen if they bred voles that had their oxytocin receptors knocked out, nullifying any potential effects of the hormone on their development. To their astonishment, the mutant voles didn’t really seem all that different, both in how they bonded to their partners and took care of their pups .“Despite being oxytocin receptor-less, male and female voles form long-term social attachments following sexual encounters. They can also deliver pups on schedule and most surprising perhaps, they can produce enough milk so that many pups survive to weaning and beyond,”author Nirao Shah, a professor of psychiatry, behavioral sciences, and neurobiology at Stanford, told Gizmodo in an email. “The pups that do survive however are smaller than pups born to normal mothers, indicating that the oxytocin receptor plays an important role in milk ejection and nursing.” The results do conflict with past studies that tried to block oxytocin in these voles, but the differences might amount to how this was accomplished, the authors say. Drugs that can suppress the oxytocin receptor in adult voles, for instance, could possibly have other off-target effects, whereas the team’s gene editing should be more precise. It’s also possible that past a certain point in their development, oxytocin does become essential to the social behavior of voles, so you can’t get rid of it without major consequences. But in voles that can’t process oxytocin from the very start of life, their biology might compensate in other ways to ensure healthy development.“What the genetics reveals is that there isn’t a ‘single point of failure’ for behaviors that are so critical to the survival of the species,” Shah said. The team’s findings, published in Neuron on Friday, aren’t the first to suggest that oxytocin’s effect onisn’t so cut and dry. Trials testing whether giving people oxytocin can boost their ability to trust others have
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