Abstract
Animal experiments have demonstrated that a wide range of prenatal exposures can impact on the behaviour of the offspring. However, there is a lack of evidence as to whether the duration of sire exposure could affect such outcomes. We compared two widely used methods for breeding offspring for behavioural studies. The first involved housing male and female C57Bl/6J mice together for a period of time (usually 10–12 days) and checking for pregnancy by the presence of a distended abdomen (Pair-housed; PH). The second involved daily introduction of female breeders to the male homecage followed by daily checks for pregnancy by the presence of vaginal plugs (Time-mated; TM). Male and female offspring were tested at 10 weeks of age on a behavioural test battery including the elevated plus-maze, hole board, light/dark emergence, forced swim test, novelty-suppressed feeding, active avoidance and extinction, tests for nociception and for prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response. We found that length of sire exposure (LSE) had no significant effects on offspring behaviour, suggesting that the two breeding protocols do not differentially affect the behavioural outcomes of interest. The absence of LSE effects on the selected variables examined does not detract from the relevance of this study. Information regarding the potential influences of breeding protocol is not only absent from the literature, but also likely to be of particular interest to researchers studying the influence of prenatal manipulations on adult behaviour.
Highlights
Accumulating epidemiological evidence suggests that adverse early life events, such as childhood trauma and neglect, can affect emotional behaviour and risk for depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse [1,2,3,4]
The latencies to emerge from the dark compartment of the light/dark test (F1,73 = 0.42, p = 0.84) and to approach the food to eat in the novelty-suppressed feeding test (Day 1; F1,73 = 0.20, p = 0.66, Day 2; F1,73 = 0.95, p = 0.33) were not significantly altered by Breeding Protocol
The length of sire exposure (LSE) to the maternal environment had no significant effects on offspring behaviour in a range of commonly assessed behavioural domains in C57Bl/6J mice
Summary
Accumulating epidemiological evidence suggests that adverse early life events, such as childhood trauma and neglect, can affect emotional behaviour and risk for depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse [1,2,3,4]. Animal studies have clearly established that the prenatal and early postnatal rearing environment influences adult behavioural responses to acute stress [5,6,7]. There is robust evidence showing that maternal stress during gestation in mice, such as restraint stress [8,9,10] and foot shock stress [11], affects prenatal offspring development and subsequent adult behavioural responses to stress. It is reasonable to assume that many environmental factors during gestation will affect early postnatal development and lead to altered behaviour in adult offspring. It is feasible that the behaviour of the sire (i.e. paternal factors) could alter either prenatal maternal stress levels or even post-natal care, which in both cases could influence subsequent behaviour of the offspring. While one study has attempted to explore the strength of paternal-offspring behavioural correlations versus the length of sire exposure (LSE) in Balb/cJ mice [13], to the best of our knowledge no studies have examined the influence of prenatal LSE on offspring behaviour
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