The effects of chronic social defeat stress on mouse self-grooming behavior and its patterning.
Stress induced by social defeat is a strong modifier of animal anxiety and depression-like phenotypes. Self-grooming is a common rodent behavior, and has an ordered cephalo-caudal progression from licking of the paws to head, body, genitals and tail. Acute stress is known to alter grooming activity levels and disrupt its patterning. Following 15-17 days of chronic social defeat stress, grooming behavior was analyzed in adult male C57BL/6J mice exhibiting either dominant or subordinate behavior. Our study showed that subordinate mice experience higher levels of anxiety and display disorganized patterning of their grooming behaviors, which emerges as a behavioral marker of chronic social stress. These findings indicate that chronic social stress modulates grooming behavior in mice, thus illustrating the importance of grooming phenotypes for neurobehavioral stress research.
Denmark
Ashley
A
Department of Pharmacology, Tulane University Medical School, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA.
Tien
David
D
Wong
Keith
K
Chung
Amanda
A
Cachat
Jonathan
J
Goodspeed
Jason
J
Grimes
Chelsea
C
Elegante
Marco
M
Suciu
Christopher
C
Elkhayat
Salem
S
Bartels
Brett
B
Jackson
Andrew
A
Rosenberg
Michael
M
Chung
Kyung Min
KM
Badani
Hussain
H
Kadri
Ferdous
F
Roy
Sudipta
S
Tan
Julia
J
Gaikwad
Siddharth
S
Stewart
Adam
A
Zapolsky
Ivan
I
Gilder
Thomas
T
Kalueff
Allan V
AV
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D002908:Chronic Disease; D004291:Dominance-Subordination; D005106:Exploratory Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D006120:Grooming / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D009716:Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000503:physiopathology*