Aggression is a complex social behavior that is necessary for survival and protecting territories/resources but can be destructive when it is expressed inappropriately. Short-term escalation in aggression is observed in many species, including humans, after an initial exposure to a conspecific intruder. This phenomenon is referred to as aggression priming. Using cell type-specific labeling and functional manipulations in different brain regions, considerable progress has been made to identify the medial amygdala (MeA), ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH), and bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST) as critical nodes for producing aggression (Choi et al., 2005; Lin et al., 2011; Unger et al., 2015; Miwako et al., 2016; Falkner et al., 2020). Olfaction has a widely accepted role in rodent aggression, and it has been shown that olfactory cues converge on MeA from the olfactory bulb, which then relays this information to multiple brain regions, including VMH and BNST (Hashikawa et al., 2016; Chen and Hong, 2018). Nevertheless, the neural basis of experience-dependent aggression priming remains unknown.
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