Journal
NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 445, Issue -, Pages 95-108Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2020.04.045
Keywords
automated tracking; ethology; long-term monitoring; translational neuroscience; social behaviour; circadian
Categories
Funding
- Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking [115916]
- European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
- EFPIA
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Social withdrawal is associated with a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders, including neurodevelopmental disorders. Rodent studies provide the opportunity to study neurobiological mechanisms underlying social withdrawal, however, homologous paradigms to increase translatability of social behaviour between human and animal observation are needed. Standard behavioural rodent assays have limited ethological validity in terms of number of interaction partners, type of behaviour, duration of observation and environmental conditions. In addition, reproducibility of behavioural findings in rodents is further limited by manual and subjective behavioural scoring. Using a newly developed automated tracking tool for longitudinal monitoring of freely moving mice, we assessed social behaviours (approach, sniff, follow and leave) over seven consecutive days in colonies of BTBR and of C57BL/6J mice in two independent laboratories. Results from both laboratories confirmed previous findings of reduced social interaction in BTBR mice revealing a high level of reproducibility for this mouse phenotype using longitudinal colony assessments. In addition, we showed that detector settings contribute to laboratory specific findings as part of the behavioural data analysis procedure. Our cross-site study demonstrates reproducibility and robustness of reduced social interaction in BTBR mice using automated analysis in an ethologically relevant context. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Animal Models of Neurodevelopmental Disorders. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of IBRO.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available