Analysis Tools
behavior/neurological
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• during the time of exposure to a rat, mice appear indifferent toward the rat: they fall asleep, approach the rat frequently and closely, and in some cases, eat and drink in the presence of rat compared to wild-type mice which show innate fear-oriented behaviors such as avoidance, maintaining maximal distance, and full vigilance
• mice stare vigilantly at the rat less than wild-type mice, however, mice are highly vigilant towards an intruder rat that is placed into a cage in which the mouse is singly housed and well acclimated, indicating that mice behave inappropriately and do not express normal self-preservation behaviors when they encounter a life threatening event concurrently with a novel environment
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• mice behave inappropriately and do not express typical self-preserving behaviors when they abruptly encounter life-threatening events while concurrently placed in a novel environment
• however, the stress-induced behavior of mice under habituated conditions is identical to that of wild-type mice suggesting that mice are easily distracted and unable to initiate normal species-specific self-protective reactions during and after exposure to novel environmental stimuli
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• after a 1-hour exposure to a rat, mice do not show a decrease in the time spend in the center area of the open field as is seen in wild-type mice, suggesting that mice are less anxious after exposure to a rat
• mice show a weakened aversion toward the lit, open compartment in the light-dark box test after exposure to a rat, indicating less anxiety in a novel environment after exposure to stress
• however, mice exhibit normal locomotor activity in the open field test under normal conditions and similar locomotor activity (total distance traveled) in the light-dark box test
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• mice show abnormal fear-oriented behaviors when placed in a novel environment
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• although mice injected with formalin in a hindpaw exhibit a normal response to the pain when returned to the home cage, mice injected with formalin in a hindpaw and returned to a novel cage exhibit a reduction in licking behavior compared to wild-type mice, indicating reduced pain-induced behavior when placed in a novel environment
• however, in the tail-flick test, mice exhibit a normal response to acute pain
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nervous system
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• restraint stress results in an inhibition of cellular activity (based on Egr1 [Zif268]+ cells) in the lateral central amygdala in wild-type mice but this stress-induced inhibition is attenuated in the lateral central amygdala neurons of mutant mice
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homeostasis/metabolism
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• male mice show levels of glucose, free fatty acid, cholesterol, triglyceride, insulin and leptin indicating a normal metabolic state
• mice exposed to a rat (a stressor) for 60 minutes exhibit increased plasma corticosterone levels to a similar level as wild-type mice indicating that mice have intact pathways for the acute neuroendocrine stress response
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