Abstract
Social deficit is a major feature of neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, but its neural mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we examined neuronal discharge characteristics in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of IRSp53-mutant mice, which show social deficits, during social approach. IRSp53-mutant excitatory mPFC neurons displayed an increase in baseline neuronal firing and decreases in variability and dynamic range of firing rates and burst firing during social and non-social target approaches compared to wild-type controls. As a consequence, their firing activity was less differential between social and non-social targets. In addition, there was a decrease in the proportion of excitatory mPFC neurons encoding social information but not that of those encoding non-social information. These results suggest that insufficient neuronal activity dynamics may underlie impaired cortical encoding of social information and social behaviors in IRSp53-mutant mice.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Competing interests: Eunjoon Kim: Reviewing editor, eLife
Data Availability: Source Data files have been provided for all figures (except for Figure 1 - figure supplement 1). N/A
Ethics: Human Subjects: No Animal Subjects: Yes Ethics Statement: Mice were maintained according to the Animal Research Requirements of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). All experiments were conducted with approval from the Committee on Animal Research at KAIST (approval number KA2020-94).
eLife’s Review Process
eLife works to improve the process of peer review so that it more effectively conveys the assessment of expert reviewers to authors, readers and other interested parties. In the future we envision a system in which research is first published as a preprint and the outputs of peer review are the primary way research is assessed, rather than journal title.
Our editorial process produces two outputs: i) an assessment by peers designed to be posted alongside a preprint for the benefit of the readers; ii) detailed feedback on the manuscript for the authors, including requests for revisions and suggestions for improvement.
Therefore we want to change how we construct and write peer reviews to make them useful to both authors and readers in a way that better reflects the work you put into reading and thinking about a paper.
eLife reviews now have three parts:
An evaluation summary (in two or three sentences) that captures the major conclusions of the review in a concise manner, accessible to a wide audience.
A public review that details the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript before you, and discusses whether the authors’ claims and conclusions are justified by their data.
A set of private recommendations for the authors that outline how you think the science and its presentation could be strengthened.
All three sections will be used as the basis for an eLife publishing decision, which will, as always, be made after a consultation among the reviewers and editor. Each of the public reviews will be published (anonymously) alongside the preprint, together with a response from the authors if they choose. In the case of papers we reject after review, the authors can choose to delay posting until their paper has been published elsewhere.
If this is your first time going through this new process, we ask that you take some time to read our Reviewer Guide, which discusses how we see each section will be used, what it should contain, and what we hope it accomplishes. And we remind you that, with the shift of reviews from private correspondence to public discourse, it is more important than ever that reviews are written in a clear and constructive manner appropriate for a public audience and mindful of the impact language choices might have on the authors.