Retell Lecture – Stress Reactivity
So the way a mother rat takes care of its pups is by licking and grooming, nipple switching an arch back nursing. So the rats that do a lot of licking and grooming and their last rats that rule very little. But most rats are in between. So that resembles a human human behavious as well, right, you have mothers that are highly mothering and mothers that couldn’t care less and most mothers are somewhere in between. So if you look at these rats. So all you do you observe them and put them in separate cages. So you put the high lickers in one cage not the mothers, but the offspring and the low lickers in another cage and then you let them grow and they’re adults now, their mothers are long buried and you look in the brain and you see that those who had high licking mothers express a lot of glucocorticoid receptor, gene and though so our lawmakers express know that reflects a number of factors and that results in a different stress response, but this is not the only difference. We found later on there are hundreds of genes that are differently expressed. So if you get in a mutation, you know polymorphism once in a million. Here, just the motherly lauching just hundreds of genes in one shot and it changes them in a very stable way that you can look at the old rat and you can say whether it was licked or not. But you can also save by behavior. So if you walk to the cages to the room the rats that were poorly lit are highly anxious, hard to handle, aggressive, and , and the rats that were very well handled as as off as little pups. They are much more relaxed much easier to handle. So you know, like every technician in the lab knows looking at the adult rat how it was licked when it was a little tough any question , of course, mechanism , how does this work?