If the male and female zebrafish brain is largely similar at the basal transcript level, behavioral and physiological sex differences may be more easily facilitated by other factors such as the hormonal, ecological, or social environment.
However, given that differences in ZT01 transcript abundance may not be manifest as downstream behavioral phenotypes for several hours, such differences may be less likely to play a primary role in nighttime sleep or sunrise anticipation.
Avt mRNA expression was shown to be male-biased in the magnocellular preoptic area of bluehead wrasses [ 176] and to increase with behavioral sex change [ 64], but such differences may be masked due to the lower neuroanatomical resolution of whole-forebrain/midbrain sampling.
Some of these differences may be due to behavioral factors or potential virulence factors such as the MDA phage, which may affect the expression of certain genes.
By adopting an attachment measure sensitive to the possibility of behavioral sex differences our data suggest that such differences may be detectable earlier in development.
These differences may be linked to microhabitat use, behavioral patterns, or specific sensitivity.
Future larger behavioral studies are required to examine working memory performance in at-risk populations and how these potential differences may be related to vulnerability to depression.
Instead, the difference was found much later in a N400 component between 300 550 msec over parietal regions, suggesting that those behavioral differences may not be due to early processing of visual identification, but later processing of subitizing or accessing mental number line when lacking attentional resources.
However, this difference may be in part attributable to our sampling regime at only 2, albeit important, time points in behavioral and neurobiological development, during infancy.
