Early-life stress and ovarian hormones alter transcriptional regulation in the nucleus accumbens resulting in sex-specific responses to cocaine

Epigenetic mechanisms underlying sex differences in the brain and behavior

Sex differences are found across brain regions, behaviors, and brain diseases. Sexual differentiation of the brain is initiated prenatally but it continues throughout life, as a result of the interaction of three major factors: gonadal hormones, sex chromosomes, and the environment. These factors are thought to act, in part, via epigenetic mechanisms which control chromatin and transcriptional states in brain cells. In this review, we discuss evidence that epigenetic mechanisms underlie sex-specific neurobehavioral changes during critical organizational periods, across the estrous cycle, and in response to diverse environments throughout life. We further identify future directions for the field that will provide novel mechanistic insights into brain sex differences, inform brain disease treatments and women's brain health in particular, and apply to people across genders.

Egr1 is a sex-specific regulator of neuronal chromatin, synaptic plasticity, and behaviour

Sex differences are found in brain structure and function across species, and across brain disorders in humans1-3. The major source of brain sex differences is differential secretion of steroid hormones from the gonads across the lifespan4. Specifically, ovarian hormones oestrogens and progesterone are known to dynamically change structure and function of the adult female brain, having a major impact on psychiatric risk5-7. However, due to limited molecular studies in female rodents8, very little is still known about molecular drivers of female-specific brain and behavioural plasticity. Here we show that overexpressing Egr1, a candidate oestrous cycle-dependent transcription factor9, induces sex-specific changes in ventral hippocampal neuronal chromatin, gene expression, and synaptic plasticity, along with hippocampus-dependent behaviours. Importantly, Egr1 overexpression mimics the high-oestrogenic phase of the oestrous cycle, and affects behaviours in ovarian hormone-depleted females but not in males. We demonstrate that Egr1 opens neuronal chromatin directly across the sexes, although with limited genomic overlap. Our study not only reveals the first sex-specific chromatin regulator in the brain, but also provides functional evidence that this sex-specific gene regulation drives neuronal gene expression, synaptic plasticity, and anxiety- and depression-related behaviour. Our study exemplifies an innovative sex-based approach to studying neuronal gene regulation1 in order to understand sex-specific synaptic and behavioural plasticity and inform novel brain disease treatments.