Abstract
Robust sex difference among humans regarding psychiatry- and pain-related behaviors is being researched; however, the use of female mice in preclinical research is relatively rare due to an unchecked potential behavioral variation over the estrous cycle. In the present study, a battery of psychiatry- and pain-related behaviors are examined under physiological condition in female C57BL/6J mice over different estrous cycle phases: proestrus, estrous, metestrous, diestrous. Our behavioral results reveal that there is no significant difference over different phases of the estrous cycle in social interaction test, sucrose preference test, tail suspension test, open field test, marble burying test, novelty-suppressed feeding test, Hargreaves thermal pain test, and Von Frey mechanical pain test. These findings implicate those psychiatry- and pain-related behaviors in normal female C57BL/6J mice appear to be relatively consistent throughout the estrous cycle; the estrous cycle might not be a main contributor to female C57BL/6J mice’s variability of behaviors.
Highlights
Animal models and behavioral tests have been used in experimental research for a long time to increase human knowledge and contribute to finding solutions to the biological and biomedical questions in ways that would be impossible in human beings (Krishnan et al, 2007; Jones et al, 2011; Esquerda-Canals et al, 2017)
In this study, utilizing a battery of widely accepted behavioral tests, we examined the estrous cycle effects on a number of psychiatry- and pain-related animal behaviors in female
Our results suggest that the behaviors described above stayed unchanged throughout different stages of the estrous cycle
Summary
Animal models and behavioral tests have been used in experimental research for a long time to increase human knowledge and contribute to finding solutions to the biological and biomedical questions in ways that would be impossible in human beings (Krishnan et al, 2007; Jones et al, 2011; Esquerda-Canals et al, 2017). In the field of psychiatry, the first batch of studies using female subjects to establish the mouse model of depression came out sequentially, two of which are chronic social defeat paradigms established on the basis of artificially induced aggression of CD1 mice to the C57BL6J female mice and the other is the vicarious social defeat model (Bourke and Neigh, 2012; Takahashi et al, 2017; Harris et al, 2018; Iñiguez et al, 2018) All of these studies have taken the effect of the estrous cycle on the behavioral outputs observed in consideration (Bourke and Neigh, 2012; Takahashi et al, 2017; Harris et al, 2018; Iñiguez et al, 2018), though none of which reported sufficient effect of estrous cycle to significantly change the performance in social interaction test. The contribution of natural estrous cycle stages to animal behaviors is still an open question and needs further investigations for studies in female animals, especially in those widely used ones
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