Poster abstracts

Poster number 73 submitted by Bradley Cutler

Determining the immune signaling necessary for behavioral fever in larval zebrafish

Bradley Cutler (The Ohio State University Neuroscience Department), Kaarthik Abhinav Balakrishnan (The Ohio State University Neuroscience Department), Jamie D. Costable (The Ohio State University Neuroscience Department), Martin Haesemeyer (The Ohio State University Neuroscience Department)

Abstract:
Behavioral fever is the tendency of vertebrates to prefer warmer environments when they are sick. While endotherms can raise their body temperature independently of the environment, behavioral means of raising one’s body temperature remain the most energetically favorable (I.E. finding a warmer area). Zebrafish rely solely on their environment for temperature control, thus make a good model for vertebrate behavioral fever because they lack endothermic processes that make behavior less critical for temperature control. We have established that thermoregulatory behaviors are conserved between our ectothermic model, Danio rerio, and endothermic mammals. To achieve this, we established a novel temperature presence assay using a thermal gradient, cameras, and fish tracking scripts developed in our lab. When injected with dsRNA, zebrafish larvae will prefer 1-2C warmer water.
Despite the importance of behavioral fever, we do not understand how inflammatory immune signals alter neural processing to drive the seeking of warmer environments. Using pharmacology, we identified that Prostaglandin E2 (PE2) signaling is required for the fever-related warm-seeking we observe in our experiments. Furthermore, we mined existing zebrafish scRNAseq data and found that hypothalamic neurons express PE2 receptor transcripts. Together, our research strongly suggests that immune signals (in response to viral antigen) drive behavioral fever through PE2 signaling in larval zebrafish. Since larval zebrafish can be bred to be transparent, calcium imaging can be carried out on a large plane with single-cell resolution without the need for surgery. We will now take advantage of the power of our larval zebrafish model to study how this immune-neural signaling manifests as differential behaviors.

References:
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Keywords: Zebrafish, Animal Behavior, Neuroscience