Laboratory of Physiopharmacology, Faculty of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Laboratory of Neurochemistry and Behaviour, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Behav Brain Res. 2022 Feb 10;418:113649. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2021.113649. Epub 2021 Oct 30.
During the last decades, most of the preclinical neurodegenerative research was performed in mouse models of amyloidosis, tauopathies or α-synucleinopathies preferentially maintained on a C57BL/6J background. However, comprehensive neurobehavioural data from C57BL/6J mice outlining the critical point of spontaneous cognitive decline are incomplete. In this study, we aimed for the neurobehavioural phenotyping of hippocampus-dependent spatial learning and memory of aging C57BL/6J mice. Neurobehavioural phenotyping was performed by means of a Morris Water Maze (MWM) and a Novel Object Recognition (NOR) test. MWM measurements revealed signs of age-related memory loss in C57BL/6J animals from the age of 6 months onward. The NOR assessment strengthened latter finding by decreasing discrimination indexes (DI) and recognition indexes (RI) starting from the age of 6 months. Taken together, these findings contribute to the current knowledge of spontaneous cognitive behaviours of this perhaps most widely used mouse strain and serve as a benchmark for dementia mouse models to distinguish spontaneous from pathological neurodegenerative behaviour.
在过去的几十年里，大多数神经退行性疾病的临床前研究都是在以 C57BL/6J 为背景的淀粉样变性、tau 病或 α-突触核蛋白病的小鼠模型中进行的。然而，C57BL/6J 小鼠自发认知衰退临界点的综合神经行为数据并不完整。在这项研究中，我们旨在对衰老 C57BL/6J 小鼠的海马依赖性空间学习和记忆进行神经行为表型分析。神经行为表型分析采用 Morris 水迷宫（MWM）和新物体识别（NOR）测试进行。MWM 测量结果显示，C57BL/6J 动物从 6 个月大开始就出现与年龄相关的记忆丧失迹象。从 6 个月大开始，NOR 评估通过降低区分指数（DI）和识别指数（RI），进一步证实了这一发现。综上所述，这些发现为这一或许是应用最广泛的小鼠品系的自发认知行为提供了当前的知识，并为痴呆小鼠模型提供了一个基准，以区分自发和病理性神经退行性行为。
