Songbirds represent an important model organism for elucidating molecular mechanisms that link genes with complex behaviors, in part because they have discrete vocal learning circuits that have parallels with those that ...

Sex-specific chromosomes, like the W of most female birds and the Y of male mammals, usually have lost most genes owing to a lack of recombination. We analyze newly available genomes of 17 bird species representing the avian ...

A pallial-basal-ganglia-thalamic-pallial loop in songbirds is involved in vocal motor learning. Damage to its basal ganglia part, Area X, in adult zebra finches has been noted to have no strong effects on song and its function ...

Song-learning birds and humans share independently evolved similarities in brain pathways for vocal learning that are essential for song and speech and are not found in most other species. Comparisons of brain transcriptomes ...

Learned vocalization, the substrate for human language, is a rare trait. It is found in three distantly related groups of birds-parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds. These three groups contain cerebral vocal nuclei for learned ...

The discrete neural network for songbird vocal communication provides an effective system to study neural mechanisms of learned motor behaviors in vertebrates. This system consists of two pathways--a vocal motor pathway ...

BACKGROUND: Nearly one-quarter of all avian species is either threatened or nearly threatened. Of these, 73 species are currently being rescued from going extinct in wildlife sanctuaries. One of the previously most ...

Efforts to understand nervous system structure and function have received new impetus from the federal Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Comparative analyses can contribute ...