Maternal Behaviour


Re: Symposium 822

Michael Numan


On Fri Dec 4, grover wrote
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>Dr. Numan: Hope you are enjoying the meeting.  Great poster.There are a number of hormonal and other physical changes which occur in animals during gestation and delivery.  It is not clear to me how one separates these changes to associate changes in expression of any genes with maternal behaviour.  How does one rule out every thing else?
>
Most of our animals are day 7 postpartum females that have been separated from their pups for a few days before various stimuli are presented for fos induction.
However, the question you ask is very important. No matter how many stimuli other than pups do not induce fos, the relationship between pup presentation, fos induction, and maternal behavior is still correlational in nature. One would have to directly interfere with fos induction (antisense for example) to test a cause-effect relationship. Such studies are in progress in our lab.
Michael Numan

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