Extended Data Fig. 9: Behavioral effects of DREADD inhibition of ACC neurons.
From: Cortical regulation of helping behaviour towards others in pain
(a) Schematic of viral injection and experimental paradigm for DREADD inhibition experiments in mCherry-expressing control animals. Created with BioRender.com. (b) Time courses of the cumulative duration of general allogrooming, targeted allolicking, allogrooming and allolicking combined, and social investigation towards pain-experiencing demonstrators by observers that were injected with either CNO or saline. The observers expressed mCherry but not hM4Di. Data are mean ± s.e.m. (c, d) Quantification of the total duration (c) and bout number (d) of general allogrooming, targeted allolicking, allogrooming and allolicking combined, and social investigation towards pain-experiencing demonstrators by mCherry-expressing observers that were injected with either CNO or saline. (e, f) Correlation between the duration of investigation and allolicking (e) or allogrooming (f) directed towards demonstrators in pain during chemogenetic inhibition of ACC neurons. Solid lines: linear regression lines, dashed lines: 95% confidence intervals. (g) Schematic of the three-chamber social preference test. (h) Total time spent in the “social” and “non-social” zones in hM4Di-expressing animals injected with CNO or saline. (i) Sociability scores of hM4Di-expressing animals injected with CNO or saline. (j, k) Duration and bout number of allolicking (j) or investigation (k) displayed by hM4Di-expressing observers injected with CNO or saline towards melittin-injected demonstrators that were under sedation. In (c, d, h-k), the center line in the boxplots indicates the median, the box limits indicate the upper and lower quartiles, and the whiskers indicate the 10th and 90th percentiles (h, i) or the minimum and maximum values (c, d, j, k). n = 10 mice per group in (b-d), 16 mice in (e, f), 14 mice per group in (h, i), and 11 mice per group in (j, k). (c, d, i) Paired t-test. (e, f) Linear regression. (h) Two-way repeated measures ANOVA followed by post hoc Bonferroni’s multiple comparisons test. (j, k) Wilcoxon signed-rank test. All statistical tests are two-sided. **P < 0.01. *P < 0.05. ns, not significant. Details of statistical analyses are provided in Supplementary Table 1.
