Acoustic prepulse inhibition in male and female prairie voles: Implications for models of neuropsychiatric illness

Abstract

Sensory gating, the ability to suppress sensory information of irrelevant stimuli, is affected in several neuropsychiatric diseases, notably schizophrenia and autism. It is currently unclear how these deficits interact with other hallmark symptoms of these disorders, such as social withdrawal and difficulty with interpersonal relationships. The highly affiliative prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) may be an ideal model organism to study the neurobiology underlying social behavior. In this study, we assessed unimodal acoustic sensory gating in male and female prairie voles using the prepulse inhibition (PPI) paradigm, whereby a lower amplitude sound (prepulse) decreases the startle response to a high amplitude sound (pulse) compared to the high amplitude sound alone. Prairie voles showed evidence of PPI at all prepulse levels compared to pulse alone, with both males and females showing similar levels of inhibition. However, unlike what has been reported in other rodent species, prairie voles did not show a within-session decrease in startle response to the pulse alone, nor did they show a decrease in startle response to the pulse over multiple days, highlighting their inability to habituate to startling stimuli (short-and long-term). When contrasted with a cohort of male wildtype C57Bl/6J mice that underwent a comparable PPI protocol, individual voles showed significantly higher trial-by-trial variability as well as longer latency to startle than mice. The benefits and caveats to using prairie voles in future sensory gating experiments are discussed.

Early life sleep disruption alters glutamate and dendritic spines in prefrontal cortex and impairs cognitive flexibility in prairie voles

“…We have previously shown in the highly social prairie vole that early life sleep disruption (ELSD) during the third postnatal week of development, resulted in a profound impairment in social behavior later in life ( Jones et al, 2018 ). Here, we show that adult voles that underwent ELSD also showed significantly impaired extinction of cued fear, a behavior that is dependent on mPFC development ( Kim et al, 2009 ) and could be attributed to impaired cognitive flexibility.…”

Detrimental effects of adolescent escalating low‐dose Δ9‐tetrahydrocannabinol leads to a specific bio‐behavioural profile in adult male rats

“…Altered prepulse inhibition (PPI) is present in schizophrenia, indicating sensorimotor gating deficits (Jones et al, 2019;Markou et al, 2009). The PPI of the startle reflex, as an index of the ability to filter out insignificant sensory information from the external environment, is also disrupted in animal models of schizophrenia (Swerdlow et al, 1990;Van den Buuse, 2010).…”

Whole genome sequencing of nearly isogenic WMI and WLI inbred rats identifies genes potentially involved in depression and stress reactivity

“…In human studies depression has been noted as a risk factor for dementia in females. Similarly, middle-aged WMI females show cognitive decline compared to middle-aged WLI females 37 . Together, these data establish WMI as a suitable model to study human depression.…”