{"title":"Parvalbumin interneurons in the insular cortex control social familiarity and emotion recognition.","authors":"Shuhei Fujima, Masaaki Sato, Nobuhiro Nakai, Toru Takumi","doi":"10.1016/j.celrep.2025.116085","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The insular cortex is involved in various aspects of social behavior, yet the role and mechanism of its inhibitory regulation remain unclear. Through cell-type-specific microendoscopic calcium imaging and chemogenetic manipulation of neuronal activity, we discovered that parvalbumin-positive interneurons (PVINs) in the agranular insular cortex (aIC) are crucial in governing social familiarity and emotion recognition. Like pyramidal neurons (PNs), a specific subset of PVINs showed increased activity during peer interactions. Inhibiting PVINs led to a failure in losing the preference for familiar peers and hindered the rise in interactions with stressed individuals. These changes in behavior were linked to alterations in the proportion of PNs that showed activity corresponding to interactions with significant peers and the transitions in their social target specificity across sessions. Our findings highlight that PVINs provide context-dependent control over socioemotional behavior and the coding of social information by locally adjusting the social preference of individual PNs in the aIC.</p>","PeriodicalId":9798,"journal":{"name":"Cell reports","volume":" ","pages":"116085"},"PeriodicalIF":6.9000,"publicationDate":"2025-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cell reports","FirstCategoryId":"99","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2025.116085","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/8/26 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"CELL BIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The insular cortex is involved in various aspects of social behavior, yet the role and mechanism of its inhibitory regulation remain unclear. Through cell-type-specific microendoscopic calcium imaging and chemogenetic manipulation of neuronal activity, we discovered that parvalbumin-positive interneurons (PVINs) in the agranular insular cortex (aIC) are crucial in governing social familiarity and emotion recognition. Like pyramidal neurons (PNs), a specific subset of PVINs showed increased activity during peer interactions. Inhibiting PVINs led to a failure in losing the preference for familiar peers and hindered the rise in interactions with stressed individuals. These changes in behavior were linked to alterations in the proportion of PNs that showed activity corresponding to interactions with significant peers and the transitions in their social target specificity across sessions. Our findings highlight that PVINs provide context-dependent control over socioemotional behavior and the coding of social information by locally adjusting the social preference of individual PNs in the aIC.
期刊介绍:
Cell Reports publishes high-quality research across the life sciences and focuses on new biological insight as its primary criterion for publication. The journal offers three primary article types: Reports, which are shorter single-point articles, research articles, which are longer and provide deeper mechanistic insights, and resources, which highlight significant technical advances or major informational datasets that contribute to biological advances. Reviews covering recent literature in emerging and active fields are also accepted.
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