Cognitive, Behavioral, and Systems NeuroscienceResearch PaperIncreased sensitivity to the effects of chronic social defeat stress in an innately anxious mouse strain
Highlights
▶C57BL/6 and BALB/c strains differing markedly in anxiety behaviours. ▶BALB/c mice are sensitive to social stressors of both short and long duration. ▶C57BL/6 mice are only sensitive to the effects of chronic stressors of long duration. ▶These data highlight different coping strategies to stress between these strains.
Section snippets
Animals
A total of 44 male BALB/cOlaHsd (BALB/c) and 48 male C57BL/6JOlaHsd (C57BL/6) mice; both aged 8–9 weeks old and a cohort of CD1 male mice, (9–10 weeks old; aggressive resident mice) were obtained from Harlan Laboratories, UK and housed under standard controlled laboratory conditions (temperature 21±1 °C, 55–60% humidity) on a 12 h light/dark cycle (lights on 7:30 am) and were provided with standard laboratory diet and water ad libitum. Animals were allowed 10 days habituation to laboratory
Chronic social defeat stress—defeat behaviour
Assessment of submissive behaviours revealed that all mice demonstrated a defeated phenotype in response to both SD paradigms, displaying the typical defensive upright or immobile submissive positions (Beitia et al., 2005, Savignac et al., 2011a). The nature and length of physical contact allowed between test and aggressive resident mice before being separated, was controlled in both SD, with a cut-off latency of attack of 3 min for SD-S, and a total of 10 min interaction allowed for SD-L.
Discussion
Social stress is one of the most potent stressful stimuli in mammals of all species (Sheridan et al., 2000, Blanchard et al., 2001). In this study, we investigated the effects of two different 10-day social defeat paradigms, relative to their severity, in two mouse strains that differ in their anxiety-related behaviour (O'Mahony et al., 2010). Our data show that BALB/c mice, which display elevated anxiety behaviour (Belzung and Griebel, 2001, Kalueff and Tuohimaa, 2005, Millstein and Holmes,
Conclusions
Overall, our studies demonstrate that the innately anxious BALB/c mice were more sensitive to social defeat stress than C57BL/6 mice, being affected by both a short and a more severe stress protocol. While C57BL/6 mice did display stress-induced alterations, these were to a lesser extent than BALB/c mice, and were only observed following the long stress procedure. To our knowledge, this has not been investigated before, and is consistent with previous findings reporting BALB/c animals were more
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Colette Manley, Patrick Fitzgerald, Fabian Sweeney, Dr. Marcela Julio-Piper and Dr. Monica Tramullas for technical assistance. The Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre is a research centre funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), through the Irish Government's National Development Plan. The authors and their work were supported by SFI (grant no.s 02/CE/B124 and 07/CE/B1368). J.F.C. is also funded by European Community's Seventh Framework Programme; Grant Number:
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2021, Life SciencesCitation Excerpt :We found the body weight change was increased in the modified CSDS-susceptible mice with depressive-like behavior, which was considered to be due, at least, to increased food consumption, while the standard ones without the depressive-like behavior did not show such alteration, indicating successful induction of depressive-like behavior was important for alteration in their body weight change. There are conflicting reports that C57BL/6J mice exposed to CSDS exhibit a decrease [29,30], no change [10] or an increase [9,31,32] in body weight. We have no reasonable explanation for this discrepancy, but differences in CSDS-exposure conditions, mouse age, etc. may be involved.