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Sociability is the disposition to interact with one another. Rodents have a rich repertoire of social behaviors and demonstrate strong sociability. Various methods have been established to measure the sociability of rodents in simple and direct ways, which includes reciprocal social interaction, juvenile social play, and three-chamber social tests. There are possible confounding factors while performing some of these tasks, such as aggression, avoidance of interaction by the stimulus mouse, exposure to a new environment, and lengthy procedures. The present study devised a method to complement these shortcomings and measure sociability as a group in the home cage setting, which prevents group-housed mice from isolation or exposure to a new environment. The home cage social test can allow high-throughput screening of social behaviors in a short amount of time. We developed two types of home cage setup: a home cage social target interaction test that measures sociability by putting the wire cage in the center area of the cage and a home cage two-choice sociability and social preference test that measures both sociability or social preference by putting cage racks at opposite sides of the cage. Interestingly, our results showed that the two types of home cage setup that we used in this study can extract abnormal social behaviors in various animal models, similar to the three-chamber assay. Thus, this study establishes a new and effective method to measure sociability or social preference that could be a complementary assay to evaluate the social behavior of mice in various setup conditions.

In response to brain insults, microglia, the resident inflammatory cells in CNS, migrate into injured sites to initiate inflammatory responses in brain. ATP, released from apoptotic or necrotic cells induce chemoattractive responses but the mechanism is not clear yet. In this study, we investigated whether ATP modulates microglial migration by regulating the activity of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs). ATP induced rapid microglial migration and increased the activity of MMP-9 in the culture supernatants (secreted compartments) in a concentration-dependent manner. The increased activity of secreted MMP-9 is due to the increased protein secretion, but not by the increased MMP-9 mRNA and protein expression. Inhibition of MMP-9 activity by treatment with specific inhibitors including GM6001 and SB-3CT prevented ATP-induced microglial migration. ATP-induced microglial migration was also inhibited by P2Y receptor antagonists including clopidogrel as well as PI3K inhibitor such as wortmanin. Taken together, ATP non-transcriptionally increased MMP-9 activity by activation of P2Y and PI3K. The results from the present investigation may provide further insights into the regulation of the activity of MMP-9 during microglial migration, which may play essential role in the regulation of inflammatory responses in pathological situations such as neurodegenerative disorders.

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remains unexplained and untreated despite the high attention of research in recent years. Aside from its various characteristics is the baffling male preponderance over the female population. Using a validated animal model of ASD which is the telomerase reverse transcriptase overexpressing mice (TERT-tg), we conducted ASD-related behavioral assessments and protein expression experiments to mark the difference between male and females of this animal model. After statistically analyzing the results, we found significant effects of TERT overexpression in sociability, social novelty preference, anxiety, nest building, and electroseizure threshold in the males but not their female littermates. Along these differences are the male-specific increased expressions of postsynaptic proteins which are the NMDA and AMPA receptors in the prefrontal cortex. The vGluT1 presynaptic proteins, but not GAD, were upregulated in both sexes of TERT-tg mice, although it is more significantly pronounced in the male group. Here, we confirmed that the behavioral effect of TERT overexpression in mice was male-specific, suggesting that the aberration of this gene and its downstream pathways preferentially affect the functional development of the male brain, consistent with the male preponderance in ASD.