ArticleBiology2021
Extensive GJD2 Expression in the Song Motor Pathway Reveals the Extent of Electrical Synapses in the Songbird Brain.
Article in Biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- Organization, neuronal composition, and dynamics of neuronal ensembles in the songbird auditory forebrain.iScience · 2026Article
- Mitochondria delay action potential propagation.Communications biology · 2025Article
- From silence to song: Testosterone triggers extensive transcriptional changes in the female canary HVC.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2025Article
- Cell type specializations of the vocal-motor cortex in songbirds.Cell reports · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Birdsong is a precisely timed animal behavior. The connectivity of song premotor neural networks has been proposed to underlie the temporal patterns of neuronal activity that control vocal muscle movements during singing. Although the connectivity of premotor nuclei via chemical synapses has been characterized, electrical synapses and their molecular identity remain unexplored. We show with in situ hybridizations that GJD2 mRNA, coding for the major channel-forming electrical synapse protein in mammals, connexin 36, is expressed in the two nuclei that control song production, HVC and RA from canaries and zebra finches. In canaries' HVC, GJD2 mRNA is extensively expressed in GABAergic and only a fraction of glutamatergic cells. By contrast, in RA, GJD2 mRNA expression is widespread in glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons. Remarkably, GJD2 expression is similar in song nuclei and their respective embedding brain regions, revealing the widespread expression of GJD2 in the avian brain. Inspection of a single-cell sequencing database from zebra and Bengalese finches generalizes the distributions of electrical synapses across cell types and song nuclei that we found in HVC and RA from canaries, reveals a differential GJD2 mRNA expression in HVC glutamatergic subtypes and its transient increase along the neurogenic lineage. We propose that songbirds are a suitable model to investigate the contribution of electrical synapses to motor skill learning and production.
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