Topic: female mice

Humans and other animals must sometimes “think outside the box” to discover better strategies that solve old problems under novel conditions, but how the metaphorical “box” itself constrains learning is unknown. In operant tasks, the mechanisms behind learning are often framed just in terms of reinforcing success or punishing failure, and any predisposed strategies for guiding actions are ignored. In ethological behaviors though, animals often have instinctive predispositions in how they approach an evolutionarily adapted task but can also learn new ways to do better. Combining chemogenetics,

Estrogens regulate a variety of processes in the central nervous system (CNS), including inflammatory responses. Therefore, postmenopause, a hypoestrogenic state, may contribute to an increased risk of developing neuroinflammatory-related disorders. Thus, it is proposed to introduce lifestyle changes that could have beneficial effects on the CNS. Regular, moderate physical activity is being considered as a potential intervention for preventing disruption of the neuroinflammation process. The aim was to investigate the impact of voluntary wheel running on neuroinflammation, including Nlrp3 infl

Hormones regulate brain function to achieve adaptive cognitive and behavioural responses. Consequently, disruption of sex hormone signaling may underlie some aspects of sex and gender bias in psychiatric and developmental brain disorder frequency and presentation. Currently, the basis by which sex steroid hormones (e.g. estradiol) alter sensory processing and cortical function is largely unexplored, as most research focuses on impacts within the hypothalamus and limbic system. Therefore, mechanistic insight is needed to understand the fundamental organization of sex hormone action on cortical

Depression affects 30 million people worldwide, and women are diagnosed with this condition nearly twice as often as men. Cognitive impairments that develop during depression contribute to poor therapeutic outcomes and reduced quality of life. Recognizing the significance of sex as a variable in depression research, we investigated the procognitive properties of a multimodal compound- HBK-15 in female mice using two models of cognitive impairments: induced by NMDA receptor blockade or stress. We employed the object recognition test to assess intermediate recognition memory. We used MK-801 (NMD

Sleep benefits memory consolidation, especially the first hours following learning, as shown in humans and rodents. However, the effect of sex on both memory performance and its dependency on sleep remains poorly investigated. To investigate the interaction between sex and sleep on memory consolidation, we employed the Novel Object Recognition Test (NORT) in rodents, a task reliant on post-learning sleep for consolidation. Six-month-old male and female mice (n=10/group) were trained with two objects, followed by either undisturbed sleep (control group) or 5 hours of sleep deprivation (SD grou

Recent data show that women are more likely to drink alcohol to cope with stress, compared to men. We hypothesized that changes in circuit function in the basolateral (BLA) and central amygdala (CeA) of females could prime for this sex-specific effect of stress on ethanol drinking. To test this, we first developed a behavioral model that captures sex differences in stress-induced ethanol drinking. After training male and female C57BL/6J mice in a drinking-in-the-dark paradigm, we show that female mice drink more ethanol following repeated exposure to a foot shock stressor, compared to male mic

The ketogenic diet (KD) is known to reduce ethanol consumption in non-stress conditions (Blanco-Gandía et al. 2021). Therefore, our objective was to assess whether KD modifies stress-induced changes in gene expression and ethanol consumption in female mice. 64 female OF1 mice were categorized into four groups based on the administered diet (KD vs. Standard Diet, STD) and exposure to stress (Vicarious Social Defeat sessions, VSD, vs. Exploration sessions, EXP): STD-EXP (n=16), STD-VSD (n=16), KD-EXP (n=16), and KD-VSD (n=16). The KD-fed mice remained in ketosis from adolescence until the final

The mechanisms underlying the emergence of a social organization in mice are mainly studied in unisex male colonies. In isogenic male mice groups, we previously showed that sociability trait predicts rank attainment in social hierarchy whereas differences in anxiety between highest and lowest ranked individuals appears after rank establishment (Battivelli et al. 2024).Here we show that isogenic female mice grouped by four rapidly form enduring social hierarchy, that can be analysed using a precedence test based on encounters within a plastic tube from which lower-ranked individuals come out ba

Sleep deprivation represents a significant public health problem in countries around the world, resulting in significant impairments in memory and performance. The hippocampus is particularly susceptible to the effects of sleep deprivation. Increasingly, studies suggest sex-specific behavioral differences occur following acute sleep deprivation, but almost all molecular studies have examined changes in males. Consequently, we investigated changes in gene expression following acute sleep deprivation in female mice at different estrous stages. Following one week of individual housing and pre-han

Early stress episodes affect brain development and is related to increased risk of developing stress-induced depression in adulthood. However, little is known about the sexual differences in this process. Our goal is to study how stress in different developmental periods affects depression-like behaviours in male and female mice. For this purpose, four experimental groups of both male and female mice of strain C57BL/6J were used: control (C) Juvenile (JE), adult (AE), and double stress JE+AE (DE).Depression-like behaviours were evaluated in the adult period. Nest building test was used to asse