Early-life experience reorganizes neuromodulatory regulation of stage-specific behavioral responses and individuality dimensions during development
Abstract
Early-life experiences may promote stereotyped behavioral alterations that are dynamic across development time, but also behavioral responses that are variable among individuals, even when initially exposed to the same stimulus. Here, by utilizing longitudinal monitoring of C. elegans individuals throughout development we show that behavioral effects of early-life starvation are exposed during early and late developmental stages and buffered during intermediate stages of development. We further found that both dopamine and serotonin shape the discontinuous behavioral responses by opposite and temporally segregated functions across development time. While dopamine buffers behavioral responses during intermediate developmental stages, serotonin promotes behavioral sensitivity to stress during early and late stages. Interestingly, unsupervised analysis of individual biases across development uncovered multiple individuality dimensions that coexist within stressed and unstressed populations and further identified experience-dependent effects on variation within specific individuality dimensions. These results provide insight into the complex temporal regulation of behavioral plasticity across developmental timescales, structuring shared and unique individual responses to early-life experiences.
Data availability
Behavioral datasets have been deposited in Mendeleyhttps://data.mendeley.com/datasets/kxrcmtyfr6/draft?a=4f4e420b-5d9b-42e6-890a-16e6332ffe0ahttps://data.mendeley.com/datasets/fgsyppvpnc/draft?a=bc4739f1-7311-4019-99e0-ec3bfb51e8f6Code of individuality analysis was deposited inhttps://github.com/yha/ElegansIndividuality
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
HORIZON EUROPE European Research Council (ERC-2019-STG)
- Shay Stern
Israel Science Foundation (3035/20)
- Shay Stern
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Ali Nasser et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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