Pleased to share our newest paper with first author Shunya Yagi (twitterless) on Sex Differences in Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus & let me just say this was one of those papers that took a while...but I believe packs a punch https://www.eneuro.org/content/7/4/ENEURO.0468-19.2020

First we found that new cells in the dentate gyrus express a mature neuronal protein, and more mature phenotype (DCX type C cells) faster (at 2 weeks) in males compared to females. What does this mean? It’s possible that new neurons may become functional more rapidly in males.

However, female cells do catch up and by 3 weeks there are just as many new neurons in females as in males..which begs the question why waste all that energy to get there faster in males?

We next examined the density of neural stem cells (Sox2) in the DG – (loosely think of this as potential new baby neurons). We found males had more in the dorsal DG than females, with no sex difference in density of Sox2 cells the ventral DG. ~:dorsal=memory, ventral=stress

However, females had more Sox2-expressing cells in the ventral compared to dorsal region – what this might mean for the functionality of the different regions is an open question – but may be intriguing because the ventral DG is thought to play a role in stress/anxiety

It's been widely cited that most of the new neurons in the DG die off after the first week from 'birth' - shown first by Heather Cameron & Liz Gould in 1993 but that was in male rats. We replicated this finding in males but we saw something different in females.

Females showed (as did males) a large increase from 2h to 24h but the drop off in surviving BrdU-ir cells in females was earlier in the dorsal DG or no drop off noticeable in the ventral DG (but remember there is no sex diff in number of new neurons at 3 weeks).

So why the difference in neurogenesis characteristics: Is it better to burn out or fade away? What difference does it make if both sexes end up in the “same place”? The jury is still out but it may have implications for the perturbation of neurogenesis by stimuli/drugs

All in all, this work suggests that #SexMatters & we shouldn’t assume that what we know from characterising neurogenesis in males is the same in females. #SABV #SGBA If you look be prepared to be amazed