Maternal care and early inflammation contributions to postnatal programming of anxiety-related behavior

LUCIANA LUCCHINA; AMAICHA MARA DEPINO

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Congreso; 14th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Comparative Psychology; 2008

International Society for Comparative Psychology

The perinatal development of the nervous system is influenced by different external and internal stimuli. Previous data show that maternal care and postnatal inflammation can induce long-term changes in anxiety-related behaviour. Our hypothesis is that both events act on the same neural system. Our aim is to study how these stimuli can interact to program adult behaviour. To this aim, we used two protocols of maternal care variation (Handling/Maternal Separation, and F1 offspring -C57BL/6J x Balb/c) and the offspring was injected at P3 with different doses of LPS or vehicle. The analysis of maternal behaviour revealed that pups subjected to Maternal Separation and the F1 pups of C57BL/6J dams, received more maternal attention. The analysis of the adult offspring revealed that handled C57BL/6J males spent less time in the darkness in the Light/Dark box test. On the contrary, maternally separated mice showed reduced immobility in the Porsolt test and reduced locomotion in the Open Field test. There was no interaction between maternal care and LPS. Balb/c adult mice showed no behavioural differences regardless of early manipulation. In summary, we characterized a mouse model of postnatal programming of anxiety-related behaviour in which we can study the molecular mechanisms involved.