de Zeeuw Chris I, Yu Si-Yang, Chen Jiawei, van Hoogstraten Willem S, van den Maagdenberg Arn M J M, Bosman Laurens W J, Kros Lieke
Department of Neuroscience, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam 3015GD, The Netherlands.
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam 1105BA, The Netherlands.
Open Biol. 2024 Dec;14(12):240250. doi: 10.1098/rsob.240250. Epub 2024 Dec 18.
Social deficits play a role in numerous psychiatric, neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders. Relating complex behaviour, such as social interaction, to brain activity remains one of the biggest goals and challenges in neuroscience. Availability of standardized tests that assess social preference is however, limited. Here, we present a novel behavioural paradigm that we developed to measure social behaviour, the modified elevated gap interaction test (MEGIT). In this test, animals are placed on one of two elevated platforms separated by a gap, in which they can engage in whisker interaction with either a conspecific or an object. This allows quantification of social preference in real interaction rather than just proximity and forms an ideal setup for social behaviour-related neuronal recordings. We provide a detailed description of the paradigm and its highly reliable, deep-learning based analysis, and show results obtained from wild-type animals as well as mouse models for disorders characterized by either hyposocial (autism spectrum disorder; ASD) or hypersocial (Williams Beuren syndrome; WBS) behaviour. Wild-type animals show a clear social preference. This preference is significantly smaller in an ASD mouse model, whereas it is larger in WBS mice. The results indicate that MEGIT is a sensitive and reliable test for detecting social phenotypes.
社交缺陷在众多精神、神经和神经发育障碍中都发挥着作用。将诸如社交互动等复杂行为与大脑活动联系起来，仍然是神经科学领域最大的目标和挑战之一。然而，用于评估社交偏好的标准化测试却很有限。在此，我们展示了一种我们开发的用于测量社交行为的新型行为范式，即改良高架间隙互动测试（MEGIT）。在该测试中，将动物放置在由间隙隔开的两个高架平台之一上，在那里它们可以与同种个体或物体进行触须互动。这使得能够在真实互动中而非仅仅在接近程度上对社交偏好进行量化，并且为与社交行为相关的神经元记录形成了理想的设置。我们提供了该范式及其基于深度学习的高度可靠分析的详细描述，并展示了从野生型动物以及以社交不足（自闭症谱系障碍；ASD）或社交过度（威廉姆斯 - 博伦综合征；WBS）行为为特征的疾病的小鼠模型中获得的结果。野生型动物表现出明显的社交偏好。在ASD小鼠模型中，这种偏好明显较小，而在WBS小鼠中则较大。结果表明，MEGIT是检测社交表型的一种灵敏且可靠的测试。
