Cellular and Molecular Perspectives of Birdsong and its Neural Circuitry

Bradley Colquitt, Ph.D.
School of Medicine
University of California San Francisco
Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Livestream via BlueJeans

ABSTRACT
From elaborate avian courtship dance and whale song to intricate spider webs and cephalopod camouflage, nature abounds with complex behaviors generated by brains with diverse architectures and evolutionary histories. Understanding the organizational principles and innovations that connect brain and behavior across species is a fundamental challenge in neurobiology and one that has tremendous import for deciphering how nervous systems function and evolve. Courtship song in songbirds is a complex learned motor behavior and provides an ideal system in which to study the links connecting the development and evolution of cells, circuits, and behavior. In this talk, I will first present published work in which I used cellular transcriptomics to characterize the molecular identities of cells in the birdsong motor pathway and found that avian song control circuits and the mammalian neocortex contain overlapping cellular types yet reside in non-homologous brain structures. Second, I will discuss ongoing work that combines neural circuit-wide gene expression profiling with quantitative birdsong analysis to characterize the molecular pathways that contribute to motor stability. Combined, this work provides the foundation for future research that integrates cell-resolved molecular profiling, comparative neurobiology, and behavioral analysis to understand the development and evolution of birdsong and its neural circuitry, providing a window into the shared principles underlying vertebrate neural circuit organization and the cellular innovations that support behavioral evolution.