RE-GROUPING AFTER SOCIAL STRESS : EVALUATING THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL DEFEAT STRESS ON ALLOGROOMING AND HOMECAGE INTERACTIONS IN MICE​

Allogrooming is a major element of establishing and maintaining social structures present in diverse species from insects to mammals. It is a quintessential part of life for social species like monkeys and apes where it has been extensively studied, as well as in humans. Even though it is less studied in other mammals such as rodents, allogrooming appears to be an important factor in the social buffering of stress and pain.
Preliminary data in our lab suggested that the stress generated by classical footshock fear conditioning is sufficient to alter prosocial grooming behaviors among cagemates at regrouping. Consequently, we aimed to leverage a combination of classical behavior, ultrasonic vocalizations recordings and supervised machine learning to investigate the effects of social defeat stress on social dynamics in male mice.
We hypothesized that unstressed individuals would provide increased prosocial behavior towards defeated animals to buffer distress. We also hypothesized that other behavioral domains would be differentially modulated by housing conditions. Thus, we housed mice in different types of triads composed either of stressed and unstressed mice or of exclusively stressed individuals. Preliminary evidence suggests a modulation of anxiety-like behavior and learned avoidance.
Our thorough approach capitalizes on the latest machine learning models to enable semi-automated analysis of behavior in the homecage as well as during standardized behavioral tests to uncover aspects of social and individual behaviors.