In female mice, aggression neurons are activated by both male and female intruders equally, whereas in male mice, aggression neurons are only activated by males.

“no matter what variation one carries out, so it doesn't matter if it's male with female, male with male, female with female, et cetera, stimulation of the ventromedial hypothalamus in a male mouse or a female mouse evokes this very dramatic, almost instantaneous aggressive behavior, physically aggressive behavior.”

“And it turns out that there's a particular category of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus that make an estrogen receptor. And it is those neurons in particular that are responsible for generating aggressive behavior.”

“that it is the activity of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus that are both necessary and sufficient to generate the full catalog of aggressive behaviors.”

“And those aggression neurons in that female's brain are activated by both male and female intruders equally, whereas in male mice, the aggression neurons are only ever activated by males, not by females, because males are never supposed to attack females, they're only supposed to mate with them.”

“And the fact is that it did work, and we were able to trigger aggression in this region using optogenetic stimulation of ventromedial hypothalamus.”

“there's evidence that the type of fighting that we elicit when we stimulate VMH is offensive aggression that is actually rewarding to male mice.”

“And then upon stimulation of those VMH neurons, one of the mice essentially tries to kill the other mouse.”

“One of the things that surprised us when we identified neurons in VMHvl that control aggression in males is that within that population, there is a subset of neurons that is activated by females during male-female mating encounters.”

“when you inject electrical current anywhere in the pear, it flows up through the entire pear and it activates the fear circuits, and those totally dominate aggression.”

“as you and I know, uh Du Lynn's work from NYU showed that these neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus when stimulated, mice will attack another mouse, >> right? >> They'll even attack a glove, >> right? Um, we can put a link to these videos. They're very dramatic to see this. You know, the the stimulation of these neurons goes on and they just will attack the glove, attack the other mouse, stop the stimulation, they stop. It's like rage switch.”

“And I think in the case of aggression, our data and others show that the more strongly you drive this region of the brain optogenetically, the more of just a hair trigger you need to set the animal off to get it to fight.”

“The work that Dau did when she was in my lab, she found a way to evoke aggression in mice using optogenetics to activate specific neurons in a region of the hypothalamus, the ventromedial hypothalamus, VH.”

“within VMH in females, there are two clearly divisible subsets of estrogen receptor neurons. and she showed that one of those subsets controls fighting and the other one controls mating.”