Cross-species behavioural genetics: A starting point for unravelling the neurobiology of human psychiatric disorders.
Identifying the genetic and neurobiological mechanisms underlying certain behavioural traits is an important strategy to understand the aetiology of various psychiatric disorders and to find potential new treatment possibilities. It has proven a great challenge to develop paradigms that allow translational research for behavioural phenotypes that are relevant for disorders across the psychiatric spectrum. Recently, there has been increasing attention for studies that implement rodent behavioural paradigms in the home cage to assess the association between genetic backgrounds and behavioural traits. The application of interspecies genetics to unravel these traits has revealed novel insights in the genetic mechanisms that are encoding phenotypes relevant to biological processes underlying psychiatric disorders. By means of two examples, namely the stress-induced hyperthermia paradigm and the home cage environment, this review aims to show that by using individual genetic variations with phenotypes obtained from mice and across categories of neuropsychiatric disorders, novel insights in the neurobiological trajectory of psychiatric disorders can be obtained.
Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, University Medical Centre Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Annetrude J G
AJ
de Mooij-van Malsen
Christiaan H
CH
Vinkers
Danielle P
DP
Peterse
Berend
B
Olivier
Martien J H
MJ
Kas
D000818:Animals; D014151:Anti-Anxiety Agents / Q000494:pharmacology; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology*; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D014644:Genetic Variation; D006799:Housing, Animal; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000235:genetics* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D013045:Species Specificity; D057170:Translational Research, Biomedical / Q000379:methods
D014151:Anti-Anxiety Agents