Project Grant K08MH144328

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded a Project Grant of $209,520 to The Regents of the University of California, San Francisco on May 12, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to support basic neuroscience research investigating the neural mechanisms underlying social attachment behavior. The funded research, titled "Circuit Mechanisms of Social Attachment in the Prairie Vole Medial Amygdala," will be conducted through April 30, 2031, and will generate peer-reviewed publications, datasets, and mechanistic insights into how the brain encodes stable social bonds. The project utilizes prairie voles—animals that naturally form lifelong pair bonds—to characterize how molecularly defined neuronal populations in the medial amygdala contribute to the emergence and maintenance of attachment behavior, with particular focus on a sex-biased neuronal population that downregulates the neuropeptide gene TAC1 following pair bond formation.

The research products resulting from this award will advance fundamental understanding of social attachment at the circuit and molecular level and may provide insights applicable to psychiatric illnesses characterized by disruptions in social bonding processes. Specifically, the investigation will employ single-cell RNA sequencing, electrophysiological recordings, and activity monitoring during pair bond formation to elucidate whether and how the identified neuronal population serves as a neural substrate for the internal state of bondedness and how this population integrates into broader brain circuits governing context-appropriate social behavior selection.