Jonny Kohl, Group Leader of the State-Dependent Neural Processing Laboratory at the Crick, has received a Wellcome Discovery Award for £2.7m to research how pregnancy and social experience remodel the mouse parental brain.

Jonny’s lab investigates how the physiological state of the body affects brain function. They study behaviour during different states in mice, such as pregnancy, parenthood, social hierarchy and hunger.

By investigating how signals in the body during these states impact the brain, the researchers hope to give insight into brain function in both health and disease.

The new funding will build on the lab’s discovery in 2023 that brain changes during pregnancy, initiated by hormones, prepare mice for the challenges of motherhood. Jonny’s team are now aiming to explore how these brain changes compare to learned parental behaviour, which happens through social experience rather than hormone changes during pregnancy.

The project will involve comparing pregnant mice (the ‘hormonal’ route) to virgin females after being repeatedly exposed to pups (the ‘experiential’ route), which can be thought of as mimicking adoption.

The researchers will investigate if the same brain areas and parenting circuits – networks of neurons involved in caring behaviour – are implicated in both routes to parenthood.

Although the two routes have the same outcome in terms of behaviour, Jonny's hypothesis is that these outcomes result from different mechanisms occurring within the same brain areas. The grant will allow him to pursue these two examples of plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to adapt in response to different contexts.

Jonny said: 

I am deeply grateful to Wellcome for supporting this ambitious project aimed at uncovering how internal and external influences shape the brain to enable behavioural flexibility. Moreover, I would like to thank all current and past members of my lab - this grant is primarily the result of their hard work and discoveries.

Wellcome Discovery Awards provide funding for established researchers and teams who want to pursue bold and creative research ideas to deliver significant shifts in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing.