Fig. 6
catFISH analysis of mPOA neuronal activation during social interactions with a female or scattered pups. a Following two sequential social interactions with either a female (F) or scattered pups (P), as indicated at the top, animals were processed to stain for c-Fos mRNA, shown in cyan, c-Fos intron in magenta, and Esr1 mRNA in blue with DAPI as the counter staining (not shown). Images on the right are blown ups of white boxes in images on the left with numbers indicating whether the identified nearby cell expresses nuclear c-Fos only (1), or cytoplasmic c-Fos only (2), or both (3). Scale bar represents 50 μm for images on the left and 10 μm for images on the right. b, c Quantification of the percentage of Esr1+ neurons (b) and non-Esr1+ neurons (c) with nuclear c-Fos that co-expressed cytoplasmic c-Fos under each test condition. F-F female-female, P-P pup-pup, F-P female-pup, P-F pup-female. For Esr1+ neurons, the percentage was significantly higher in animals exposed to the same stimuli compared to those to different stimuli. For non-Esr1+ neurons, the percentage was only found to be different between the “F-F” and “P-F” group in males. One-way ANOVA with Bonferroni correction. N = 3 per condition per sex. **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001
