The relationship between the number of neurons and behavioral performance in Swiss mice

NEUROSCIENCE LETTERS

卷:735

Article

Neves, Kleber^1,2  Guercio, Gerson Duarte^2,5  Anjos-Travassos, Yuri²  Costa, Stella²  Perozzo, Ananda²  Montezuma, Karine²  Herculano-Houzel, Suzana³  Panizzutti, Rogerio^2,4 

[1] Univ Fed Rio de Janeiro, Inst Bioquim Med Leopoldo de Meis, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

[2] Univ Fed Rio de Janeiro, Inst Ciencias Biomed, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

[3] Vanderbilt Univ, Dept Psychol, Dept Biol Sci, Vanderbilt Brain Inst, Nashville, TN 37240 USA

[4] Univ Fed Rio de Janeiro, Inst Psiquiatria, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

[5] Univ Minnesota, Dept Psychiat, 2312 S 6th St, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA

关键词: Isotropic fractionator;    Comparative neurobiology;    Intraspecific variation;    Environmental enrichment;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neulet.2020.135202

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Neuronal number varies by several orders of magnitude across species, and has been proposed to predict cognitive capability across species. Remarkably, numbers of neurons vary across individual mice by a factor of 2 or more. We directly addressed the question of whether there is a relationship between performance in behavioral tests and the number of neurons in functionally relevant structures in the mouse brain. Naive Swiss mice went through a battery of behavioral tasks designed to measure cognitive, motor and olfactory skills. We estimated the number of neurons in different brain regions (cerebral cortex, hippocampus, olfactory bulb, cerebellum and remaining areas) and crossed the two datasets to test the a priori hypothesis of correlation between cognitive abilities and numbers of neurons. Surprisingly, performance in the behavioral tasks did not correlate strongly with number of neurons in any of the brain regions studied. Our results show that whereas neuronal number is a predictor of cognitive skills across species, it is not a good predictor of cognitive, sensory or motor ability across individuals within a species, which suggests that other factors are more relevant for explaining cognitive differences between individuals of the same species.

【 授权许可】

Free