Mice Selectively Bred for Open-Field Thigmotaxis: Life Span and Stability of the Selection Trait

Leppänen, Pia K.; Ewalds-Kvist, S. Béatrice M.; Selander, Ritva-Kajsa

doi:10.3200/genp.132.2.187-204

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…The regularity in which a MDF is managed and exhausted before passing to the next MDF implies recordkeeping and therefore cognition-related skills. The primacy of attention to edges over attention to the spaces between them is characteristic of perceptual systems, regardless of the agent and the sensory channel used (35)(36)(37)(38). The recent discovery of border cells in the rat's entorhinal cortex (39) supports the distinct status of borderline movement, while the sequence we report suggests a corresponding developmental dynamics in the brain.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Freedom of movement and the stability of its unfolding in free exploration of mice

Fonio¹,

Benjamini

Golani³

2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

118

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Exploration is a central component of human and animal behavior that has been studied in rodents for almost a century. The measures used by neuroscientists to characterize full-blown exploration are limited in exposing the dynamics of the exploratory process, leaving the morphogenesis of its structure and meaning hidden. By unfettering exploration from constraints imposed by hunger, thirst, coercion, and the confines of small cage and short session, using advanced computational tools, we reveal its meaning in the operational world of the mouse. Exploration consists of reiterated roundtrips of increasing amplitude and freedom, involving an increase in the number of independent dimensions along which the mouse moves (macro degrees of freedom). This measurable gradient can serve as a standard reference scale for the developmental dynamics of some aspects of the mouse's emotional-cognitive state and for the study of the interface between behavior and the neurophysiologic and genetic processes mediating it. dimensionality emergence assay (DIEM assay) ͉ dynamics of exploration ͉ mouse open field behavior ͉ neophobia E xploration is the process by which animals and man familiarize themselves with a novel environment. The drive to explore is so fundamental that it overrides most of the other drives: Man enters life-threatening situations in his exploration of ever new territories on the planet and in outer space, and a dam rat placed in an unforeseen environment together with its pups, first explores the new territory extensively and only then attends to the pups. Exploratory behavior has been studied in rodents for almost a century in two main setups-in mazes (1,2) and in the open field test (3). While mazes are most appropriate for testing formulated hypotheses because they impose a priori constraints on the path, the paucity of such constraints in the open field arena highlights intrinsic constraints, offering unexpected hypotheses (4-10). The open field is one of the most common tests in the study of navigation (11), curiosity (12), anxiety (13, 14), lesion-induced (15), drug-induced (16, 17), genetically engineered behavior (18,19), and behavior of animal models of psychiatric diseases (20, 21). The measurements taken in it consist, however, of statistical summaries (22, 23) disregarding the dynamics of occupancy of a novel environment and the animal's moment-to-moment emotional and cognitive states. A dynamic representation of these processes and states is clearly indispensable for correlating the behavior with the neurophysiologic processes that mediate the behavior.To reduce external constraints on the mouse's behavior, we extend the arena 10-fold in space and 100-fold in time (to 2.5-m diameter for 45 h). To increase the likelihood of novelty-seeking and inquisition rather than adjustment to novelty we replace the forced and stressful introduction of the mouse into the arena with free exploration from a home-shelter (8,(24)(25)(26)(27), to reduce the likelihood of foraging we provide free supply of food and wat...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Freedom of movement and the stability of its unfolding in free exploration of mice

Fonio¹,

Benjamini

Golani³

2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

118

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“…In addition, increased latency to first entry in the anxiogenic areas of the EPM (open arms) and of the open field arena (central zone) were observed, together with decreases in the distance traveled in these areas. Moreover, thigmotaxis, a stable and robust indicator of discomfort manifested by the tendency to remain close to the walls (secure area) [ 39 40 ] was markedly increased in artificial daylight–exposed, as indicated by increases in the number of activities close to walls in all the behavioral tests performed. Besides, a shift in behavioral baseline was indicated by increases in EPM central platform time [ 41 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of the safety of conventional lighting replacement by artificial daylight

Etet

Farahna

Khayr

et al. 2017

J Microsc Ultrastruct

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Background:Short morning exposure to high illuminance visible electromagnetic radiations termed as artificial daylight is beneficial for the mental health of people living in geographical areas with important seasonal changes in daylight illuminance. However, the commercial success of high illuminance light sources has raised the question of the safety of long hour exposure.Methods:We have investigated the effect of the replacement of natural daylight by artificial daylight in Swiss mice raised under natural lighting conditions. Mice were monitored for neurotoxicity and general health changes. They were submitted to a battery of conventional tests for mood, motor and cognitive functions’ assessment on exposure day (ED) 14 and ED20. Following sacrifice on ED21 due to marked signs of neurotoxicity, the expression of markers of inflammation and apoptosis was assessed in the entorhinal cortex and neurons were estimated in the hippocampal formation.Results:Signs of severe cognitive and motor impairments, mood disorders, and hepatotoxicity were observed in animals exposed to artificial daylight on ED20, unlike on ED14 and unlike groups exposed to natural daylight or conventional lighting. Activated microglia and astrocytes were observed in the entorhinal cortex, as well as dead and dying neurons. Neuronal counts revealed massive neuronal loss in the hippocampal formation.Conclusions:These results suggest that long hour exposure to high illuminance visible electromagnetic radiations induced severe alterations in brain function and general health in mice partly mediated by damages to the neocortex-entorhinal cortex-hippocampus axis. These findings raise caution over long hour use of high illuminance artificial light.

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“…The 10 attributes chosen for this study (Table 2) consist of the variables found most useful for the analysis of open-field behavior throughout many previous studies. The distance from the wall d was shown to measure heritable thigmotactic behavior (Broadhurst, 1975;Leppanen et al, 2005;Lipkind et al, 2004) highly replicable across laboratories . The momentary speed v was shown to be a key variable in the intrinsic categorization of behavior into progression and 'lingering' in both mice ) and rats (Kafkafi et al, 2001).…”

Section: Pattern Array Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus the key to applying a data mining approach in behavioral analysis is designing a useful 'chip', that is, constructing a proper categorization of the data into multiple types of behavior that can be mined. To this end the units employed by PA consist of a large number (B100 000) of complex movement patterns, algorithmically defined as simultaneous combinations of several ethologically relevant 'attributes' such as the distance from the arena wall (Broadhurst, 1975;Leppanen et al, 2005;Lipkind et al, 2004), the speed and acceleration of movement (Kafkafi et al, 2003b), direction of movement (Horev et al, 2007), and turning . For example, by using the three attributes of acceleration, distance from the wall and turning, a specific movement pattern in PA may be defined as the combination 'heavily braking while moving near the wall but turning slightly away from it'.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Data Mining Approach to In Vivo Classification of Psychopharmacological Drugs

Kafkafi

Yekutieli

Elmer

2008

Neuropsychopharmacol

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Data mining is a powerful bioinformatics strategy that has been successfully applied in vitro to screen for gene-expression profiles predicting toxicological or carcinogenic response ('class predictors'). In this report we used a data mining algorithm named Pattern Array (PA) in vivo to analyze mouse open-field behavior and characterize the psychopharmacological effects of three drug classesFpsychomotor stimulant, opioid, and psychotomimetic. PA represents rodent movement with B100 000 complex patterns, defined as multiple combinations of several ethologically relevant variables, and mines them for those that maximize any effect of interest, such as the difference between drug classes. We show that PA can discover behavioral predictors of all three drug classes, thus developing a reliable drug-classification scheme in small group sizes. The discovered predictors showed orderly dose dependency despite being explicitly mined only for class differences, with the high doses scoring 4-10 standard deviations from the vehicle group. Furthermore, these predictors correctly classified in a dose-dependent manner four 'unknown' drugs (ie that were not used in the training process), and scored a mixture of a psychomotor stimulant and an opioid as being intermediate between these two classes. The isolated behaviors were highly heritable (h 2 450%) and replicable as determined in 10 inbred strains across three laboratories. PA can in principle be applied for mining behaviors predicting additional properties, such as within-class differences between drugs and within-drug dose-response, all of which can be measured automatically in a single session per animal in an open-field arena, suggesting a high potential as a tool in psychotherapeutic drug discovery.

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Mice Selectively Bred for Open-Field Thigmotaxis: Life Span and Stability of the Selection Trait

Cited by 11 publications

References 46 publications

Freedom of movement and the stability of its unfolding in free exploration of mice

Freedom of movement and the stability of its unfolding in free exploration of mice

Evaluation of the safety of conventional lighting replacement by artificial daylight

A Data Mining Approach to In Vivo Classification of Psychopharmacological Drugs

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