Abstract
Exposure to stress during early life affects subsequent behaviors and increases the vulnerability to adult pathologies, a phenomenon that has been well documented in humans and rodents. In this study, we introduce a chronic unpredictable stress protocol adapted to young zebrafish, which is an increasingly popular vertebrate model in neuroscience research. We exposed zebrafish to a series of intermittent and unpredictable mild stressors from day 10 to 17 post-fertilization. The stressed fish showed a reduced exploration of a novel environment one day post-stress and an increased responsiveness to dark-light transition two days post-stress, indicative of heightened anxiety-related behaviors. The stress-induced decrease in exploration lasted for at least three days and returned to control levels within one week. Moreover, stressed fish were on average 8% smaller than their control siblings two days post-stress and returned to control levels within one week. All together, our results demonstrate that young zebrafish exposed to chronic unpredictable stress develop growth and behavioral alterations akin to those observed in rodent models.
Highlights
Exposure to stress during early life affects subsequent behaviors and increases the vulnerability to adult pathologies, a phenomenon that has been well documented in humans and rodents
Upon longer exposure to inescapable mild electric shocks, young zebrafish initially attempted to escape before rapidly reducing their locomotor activity[26], which is an example of a transition from active to passive coping strategies found in other vertebrates[27]
As previous studies have demonstrated that early life stress slows down development in fish[31,32], we compared body length between groups of fish two days post-chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) and found that CUS-exposed fish were 8% smaller on average than their control siblings (Fig. 1A)
Summary
Exposure to stress during early life affects subsequent behaviors and increases the vulnerability to adult pathologies, a phenomenon that has been well documented in humans and rodents. Zebrafish larvae are optically transparent, which allows for rapid measurement of brain-wide neural activity at single-cell resolution during the first weeks of life[17,18] During this period, zebrafish already swim freely, feed externally and develop complex sensorimotor and social behaviors[19,20,21], which are modulated by stress in adults[15,22,23] and enable to investigate the outcomes of chronic stress. Cortisol or 9 h forced swimming, caused a heightened locomotor activity[28,29] and a blunted stress-induced cortisol release[29] in the following days All together, these studies illustrate that the behavioral outcomes of early-life adversity vary depending on the nature, intensity, duration and timing of the stressors, and motivate further investigation of how early-life stress affects zebrafish behavior
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