Arkarup Banerjee

Social animals must interact with each other to cooperate and compete. Using sounds for such interactions is common across many taxa. Humans engaged in conversation, for example, take rapid turns to go back and forth–a feat that most of us tend to perform effortlessly, but which breaks down during neuropsychiatric disorders. Our understanding of neural circuits that underlie vocal communication, especially in mammals, remains quite rudimentary. Recently, we have discovered that a neo-tropical rodent, Alston’s singing mouse, engages in fast vocal interactions, even under laboratory settings. The Banerjee lab, using this novel model system, seeks to pursue two complementary questions. First, how does the auditory system interact with the motor system to generate the sensorimotor loop required for vocal communication? Second, what are the neural circuit modifications that allow behavioral novelty to emerge during evolution? Various rodent species exhibit marked differences in vocal behaviors. Genes that determine such behavioral differences, for example between the singing mouse and the lab mouse, must act via neural circuits within the brain. Yet, the structural and functional changes in the brain that specify the distinct vocal repertoires across related species remain unknown. Research in the lab combines cutting-edge systems neuroscience and comparative evolutionary analyses of neural circuitry across rodent species to bridge this knowledge-gap.