The role of monoamines in modulating behavior

Understanding the mechanisms underlying complex behaviors requires a comprehensive investigation of the neurobiological factors that regulate and modulate their expression. Monoamines, such as serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline, serve a variety of essential physiological roles in modulating animal behavior. Furthermore, the evolutionary conservation of these aminergic systems spans across both vertebrates and invertebrates, having comparable effects in such diverse processes as learning and memory, aggression, mating behaviors and reproduction, stress responses, locomotion, and collective social behaviors (Dishman 1997; Libersat and Pflueger 2004; Kamhi and Traniello 2013; Bubak et al. 2014a; De Boer et al. 2015). Outstanding research is currently being conducted in this field, uncovering remarkable similarities in neural circuitries even among highly divergent taxa, such as Drosophila and humans. Investigating the neural mechanisms involved in the monoaminergic modulation of behavior across a variety of taxonomically distant species can provide researchers with a better understanding of the origins and functions of these systems. The goal of this special issue is to provide a venue in which colleagues studying similar questions across highly divergent animal systems can present their recent and groundbreaking work in this exciting area of biology. We hope this collection of papers will encourage and stimulate a dialogue on the similarities of monoaminergic function in a wide variety of animals and ultimately promote future comparative approaches when investigating behavioral modulation.