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Intraneuronal convergence of environmental and hormonal stimuli associated with female reproduction in rats
Abstract
The expression of lordosis in rats, the receptive component of female sexual behavior, requires sufficient levels of circulating estradiol and progesterone and the appropriate tactile stimuli usually provided by the male during mounting. Estradiol and progesterone mediate many of their effects on female sexual behavior by acting through their respective receptors in neurons, located predominantly in the preoptic area, hypothalamus and midbrain. Tactile stimuli also appear to regulate lordosis by acting in the brain. Taken together, this suggests that hormonal and tactile stimuli associated with female reproduction may converge on specific neurons in the brain. This dissertation investigated the intraneuronal convergence of information associated with estradiol and vaginal-cervical stimulation (VCS), an important aspect of tactile stimuli provided by the male during copulation. In the first experiment, an increase in the number of neurons expressing Fos, an indicator of neuronal response, was observed in the medial preoptic area, medial bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, posterodorsal medial amygdala, ventromedial hypothalamus and midbrain following VCS. In the second experiment, these same brain regions responded to VCS provided by manual probing, which elicits many of the same behavioral and endocrine changes related to female reproduction as VCS by mating. In the third experiment it was determined that steroid hormones influence the number of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus which respond to VCS. In the final experiment, it was found that many of the neurons that respond to VCS also contain estrogen receptors, suggesting that they can also respond to estradiol. These results suggest that sensory and hormonal information associated with female reproduction converge on specific populations of neurons and may be integrated at the molecular level within these neurons.
Subject Area
Neurosciences
Recommended Citation
Tetel, Marc Jeffrey, "Intraneuronal convergence of environmental and hormonal stimuli associated with female reproduction in rats" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9408354.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9408354