IBCN   20355
INSTITUTO DE BIOLOGIA CELULAR Y NEUROCIENCIA "PROFESOR EDUARDO DE ROBERTIS"
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
INACTIVE BUT AWAKE BEHAVIOUR AS A POTENTIAL INDICATOR OF A HOUSING-INDUCED DEPRESSIVE-LIKE STATE IN MICE
Autor/es:
M MENDL; A RESASCO; E FINNEGAN; C FUREIX; A TREVARTHEN; E PAUL
Lugar:
Bruges
Reunión:
Congreso; Advancing Animal Welfare Science: How Do We Get There? ? Who Is It Good For?; 2019
Institución organizadora:
UFAW
Resumen:
An important goal in the assessment of animal welfare is to develop measures of affective state. In humans, chronic negative affective states such as clinical depression are associated with symptoms such as reduced activity and a lack of engagement with the environment. Recent work has started to investigate ?inactive but awake? (IBA) behaviour as a potential measure of welfare in animals, however the link between this behaviour and affective state has not yet been well-validated and characterised.We investigated this link with two strains of commonly used laboratory mice (C57BL/6J and DBA/2J, C57 and DBA hereafter), which have previously been shown to vary in their display of IBA. We took a novel approach by manipulating housing conditions to monitor how IBA behaviour differed following anenvironmental shift. Thirty-one C57 and 31 DBA mice were mixed-strain pair housed in either a nonenriched (potentially depressogenic) cage (NE; N=16 cages) or a large, highly enriched cage (EE; N=15 cages) for three weeks (Phase 1). Half the cages were then swapped to the opposite housing condition(i.e. NE-EE: N=8 cages or EE-NE: N=8 cages), whilst the other half remained in their environment for a further three weeks (Phase 2). We tested the hypothesis that IBA is an indicator of a depressive-like state and hence predicted that mice housed in NE would display more IBA than those in EE.Furthermore, we expected mice to display more IBA in the EE-NE condition following their environmental shift compared to those housed in NE throughout. Based on previous research, we also predicted C57s to display more IBA than DBA mice. To test these hypotheses, home-cage behaviour was monitored over 12 days during each phase using scan sampling (24 scans/day/mouse). We found that mice spent a greater proportion of scans displaying IBA in the NE than EE condition during phase 1 (ꭓ2 2=6.92, p=0.003), however contrary to our predictions, DBAs showed more IBA in NE cages than C57s (ꭓ2 2=5.04, p=0.02). Mice in the EE-NE condition showed the greatest increase in IBA behaviour between phases compared to all other conditions (treatment*phase: ꭓ2 10=11.76, p=0.040). These results suggest IBA has potential as an indicator of a housing-induced depression-like state in mice and provide a platform for validation with additional behavioural indicators within our work. The strain differences measured here conflict some previous findings and warrant further investigation to assess the generalisability of these results across the same and different strains of mice.