SRA

Prolonged social isolation has negative effects on brain and behaviour in humans and other social organisms, but neural mechanisms leading to these effects are not understood. Here we tested the hypothesis that even brief periods of social isolation can alter gene expression in higher cognitive centers of the brain, focusing on the auditory/associative forebrain of the highly social zebra finch. Adult female zebra finches (n=12 per group) were either placed in sound attenuation chambers overnight, or taken directly from a single-sex group aviary. The auditory lobule (AL, which includes the primary auditory cortex equivalent (Field L) and the surrounding high-order auditory and associative areas, caudomedial nidopallium (NCM) and caudomedial mesopallium (CMM)) was dissected. RNA was extracted and library preparation and sequencing were provided by Barts and the London Genome Centre (BLGC) at Queen Mary University of London, at an average read depth of 31.7 million 100bp paired end reads per sample.