Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA.
Neuroscience Graduate Group, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
BMC Genomics. 2024 Aug 8;25(1):771. doi: 10.1186/s12864-024-10653-z.
Prolonged or chronic social isolation has pronounced effects on animals, ranging from altered stress responses, increased anxiety and aggressive behaviour, and even increased mortality. The effects of shorter periods of isolation are much less well researched; however, short periods of isolation are used routinely for testing animal behaviour and physiology. Here, we studied how a 3 h period of isolation from a cagemate affected neural gene expression in three brain regions that contain important components of the social decision-making network, the hypothalamus, the nucleus taeniae of the amygdala, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, using a gregarious bird as a model (zebra finches). We found evidence suggestive of altered neural activity, synaptic transmission, metabolism, and even potentially pain perception, all of which could create cofounding effects on experimental tests that involve isolating animals. We recommend that the effects of short-term social isolation need to be better understood and propose alternatives to isolating animals for testing.
长期或慢性的社交隔离对动物有显著的影响，包括应激反应改变、焦虑和攻击行为增加，甚至死亡率增加。短期隔离的影响研究得较少；然而，短期隔离常被用于测试动物的行为和生理。在这里，我们研究了与笼伴隔离 3 小时如何影响三个包含社会决策网络重要组成部分的大脑区域的神经基因表达，这三个大脑区域是下丘脑、杏仁核的终纹床核和终纹床核，使用群居鸟类（斑马雀）作为模型。我们发现了一些证据，表明神经活动、突触传递、代谢甚至潜在的疼痛感知发生了改变，所有这些都可能对涉及隔离动物的实验测试产生混杂影响。我们建议更好地理解短期社交隔离的影响，并提出替代方案来隔离动物进行测试。
