Yang Mu, Weber Michael D, Crawley Jacqueline N
Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience, Intramural Research Program, National Institute of Mental Health Bethesda, MD, USA.
Front Neurosci. 2008 Dec 15;2(2):186-91. doi: 10.3389/neuro.01.029.2008. eCollection 2008 Dec.
The rich repertoire of mouse social behaviors makes it possible to use mouse models to study neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by social deficits. The fact that mice are naturally nocturnal animals raises a critical question of whether behavioral experiments should be strictly conducted in the dark phase and whether light phase testing is a major methodologically mistake. Although mouse social tasks have been performed in both phases in different laboratories, there seems to be no general consensus on whether testing phase is a critical factor or not. A recent study from our group showed remarkably similar social scores obtained from inbred mice tested in the light and the dark phase, providing evidence that light phase testing could yield reliable results as robust as dark phase testing for the sociability test. Here we offer a comprehensive review on mouse social behaviors measured in light and dark phases and explain why it is reasonable to test laboratory mice in experimental social tasks in the light phase.
小鼠丰富多样的社会行为使得利用小鼠模型研究以社交缺陷为特征的神经发育障碍成为可能。小鼠是天生的夜行性动物，这就引发了一个关键问题：行为实验是否应严格在黑暗阶段进行，以及在光照阶段进行测试是否在方法上存在重大错误。尽管不同实验室在两个阶段都进行了小鼠社交任务，但对于测试阶段是否是一个关键因素，似乎并没有普遍共识。我们团队最近的一项研究表明，近交系小鼠在光照阶段和黑暗阶段进行测试时，获得的社交得分非常相似，这证明在社交能力测试中，光照阶段测试能够产生与黑暗阶段测试同样可靠的结果。在此，我们对在光照和黑暗阶段测量的小鼠社会行为进行全面综述，并解释为什么在光照阶段对实验小鼠进行实验性社交任务测试是合理的。
