RT Journal Article
T1 Evolutionarily conserved role of oxytocin in zebrafish social reward encoding
A1 Kareklas, Kyriacos
A1 Herrera Castillo, Lisbeth Carolina
A1 Levkowitz, Gil
A1 Oliveira, Rui F.
AB Social rewards may have evolved in social species to reinforce adaptive social interactions. Yet, evidence for social rewards is still scarce, and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. A key candidate to regulate the value of social stimuli is oxytocin due to its role in social affiliation, which is traced to its origins in ray-finned fish—but whether it encodes rewards is uncertain. Using a single-trial conditioned place preference test, we found that wild-type zebrafish increased preference for a neutral unpreferred cue associated with a same-sex sibling, while oxytocin receptor (oxtr) mutants did not. These findings demonstrate the necessity of oxtr for social rewards, while the short exposure infers its role in encoding rather than consolidation. Our results provide evidence for an evolutionarily conserved role of oxytocin in social reward encoding given the available evidence for similar effects in rodents.
PB The Royal Society Publishing
SN 1744-9561
YR 2025
FD 2025-11
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/132327
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/132327
LA eng
NO Kyriacos Kareklas, Lisbeth Herrera-Castillo, Gil Levkowitz, Rui F. Oliveira; Evolutionarily conserved role of oxytocin in zebrafish social reward encoding. Biol Lett 1 November 2025; 21 (11): 20250628. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0628
NO This study was conducted as part of K.K.’s Research Fellowship by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, FCT; 2021.01659.CEECIND) and funded by the FCT grant PTDC/BIA-COM/3068/2020 awarded to R.O. G.L. is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (349/21) and Ministry of Science and Technology (3-16548), and Hedda, Alberto, and David Milman Baron Center for Research on the Development of Neural Networks. L.H.C. is supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Complutense University of Madrid (CT63/19-CT64/19) and her research stay at the Gulbenkian Institute was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [PID2022-136288OB-C32 (MCIN/AEI//10.13039/501100011033)].
NO Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)
NO Universidad Complutense de Madrid
NO Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 21 mar 2026