title: The effects of chronic social defeat stress on mouse self-grooming behavior and its patterning.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pharmacology, Tulane University Medical School, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA.
authors.forename: Ashley
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Denmark
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tien
authors.forename: Keith
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Amanda
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cachat
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Goodspeed
authors.forename: Chelsea
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Grimes
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Elegante
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Suciu
authors.forename: Salem
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Elkhayat
authors.forename: Brett
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bartels
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jackson
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rosenberg
authors.forename: Kyung Min
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.forename: Hussain
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Badani
authors.forename: Ferdous
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kadri
authors.forename: Sudipta
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Roy
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.forename: Siddharth
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gaikwad
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Stewart
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Zapolsky
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gilder
authors.forename: Allan V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Kalueff
mesh_terms: 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*