Comparative atlas of PVN oxytocin and vasopressin neural circuitry

Overview:This repository contains the raw imaging data supporting the manuscript:Comparative atlas of PVN oxytocin and vasopressin systems reveals sex-conserved input-output wiring The dataset includes fluorescence microscopy images acquired for two complementary viral tracing experiments in male and female mice: Anterograde axonal projection tracing in oxytocin and vasopressin PVN neurons Monosynaptic rabies retrograde tracing in oxytocin and vasopressin PVN neurons Project summary: Oxytocin and vasopressin are structurally similar neuropeptides that regulate diverse social behavior and homeostatic processes, often in a sex-dependent manner. Whether such sex-dependent functions arise from fundamental neural circuit organization remains unresolved, and no prior study has systematically compared the input-output architectures of these systems across the brain. Here we present the first comprehensive unbiased mapping of synaptic inputs and axonal projections for both neuropeptide populations in male and female mice. We find that oxytocin and vasopressin paraventricular circuits are largely sex-invariant, with highly similar inputs but divergent axonal projection patterns. This study reveals the shared and specialized organizational principles underlying oxytocin and vasopressin systems of the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus. Dataset contents: The dataset in this repository contains raw fluorescence images as .tif files, organized by experiment type (e.g., projection or input tracing), sex, and cell type (e.g., oxytocin or vasopressin). Each zip file contains all subjects for each experiment type. All images are high-resoultion, single-channel fluorescent images of coronal brain sections with either axonal projections or retrogradely-labelled inputs of oxytocin/vasopressin neurons. All images are saved as 16-bit TIFF (.tif) files, converted from the native microscopy file format (.vsi).