Dynamic encoding of social threat and spatial context in the hypothalamus - calcium activity recordings and behavioural dataset

Social aggression and avoidance are defensive behaviors expressed by
territorial animals in a manner appropriate to spatial context and
experience. The ventromedial hypothalamus controls both social aggression
and avoidance, suggesting that it may encode an general internal state of
threat modulated by space and experience. Here we show that neurons in the
mouse ventromedial hypothalamus are activated both by the presence of a
social threat as well as by a chamber where social defeat previously
occurred. Moreover, under conditions where the animal could move freely
between a home and defeat chamber, firing activity emerged that predicted
the animal’s position, demonstrating the dynamic encoding of spatial
context in the hypothalamus. Finally, we found that social defeat induced
a functional reorganization of neural activity as optogenetic activation
could elicit avoidance after, but not before social defeat. These findings
reveal how the hypothalamus dynamically encodes spatial and sensory cues
to drive social behaviors.