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. 2021 Oct 11;11:20130. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99497-1

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Local estrogen concentrations increase in POM but not in other brain regions during sexual interactions. (a) Schematic representation of coronal sections of the quail brain showing the location of the dialysis probes. IN probes are either within or touching the colored zones representing brain regions expressing aromatase. See legend of Fig. 1 for the definition of different brain areas. Black and open circles respectively represent birds in which estrogen concentrations did or did not increase above 150% of the baseline (BL) during the interaction period (last sample of each experimental condition). (b) Mean percent changes of estrogen concentration in the dialysate over time following a sexual interaction (based on the mean concentration measured in the last 2 BL samples). OUT: Birds with a cannula outside any aromatase expressing cell populations. INT: physical interaction with the female, POST: post-interaction period. Only males with a cannula in the POM showed a significant rise in estrogens peaking during the interaction period and then gradually decreasing (Friedman ANOVAs: POM, χ²_n=26 = 18.90, p = 0.002; BST, χ²_n=9 = 3.591, p = 0.6097; VMN, χ²_n=5 = 3.2187, p = 0.6664; OUT, χ²_n=20 = 4.4274, p = 0.5100; post hoc **p < 0.01 vs BL). (c) Individual percent changes in estrogen concentration relative to BL in the last time point of the three sampling periods for animals whose probe was placed in POM, BST or VMN, or outside a nucleus expressing aromatase (OUT). (Friedman ANOVAs: POM: χ²_n=26 = 10.17, p = 0.0062; BST: χ²_n=9 = 0.7879, p = 0.7065; VMN: χ²_n=5 = 0.4, p = 0.9537; OUT: χ²_n=20 = 5.733, p = 0.0569; post hoc *p < 0.05 vs BL). The baseline amounts of estrogens per sample in this experiment ranged between 0.023 and 1.390 pg per sample (10 µl; Mean ± S.E.M. = 0.201 ± 0.034, n = 60). Panel A is composed of home made drawings onto which probe positions were reported using Graphic for Mac (https://graphic.com/mac/), other panels were created with Graph Pad Prism 8 (https://www.graphpad.com/scientific-software/prism/). All panels were assembled in Graphic.