Assessing Burrowing, Nest Construction, and Hoarding in Mice

Abstract

Deterioration in the ability to perform "Activities of daily living" (ADL) is an early sign of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Preclinical behavioural screening of possible treatments for AD currently largely focuses on cognitive testing, which frequently demands expensive equipment and lots of experimenter time. However, human episodic memory (the most severely affected aspect of memory in AD) is different to rodent memory, which seems to be largely non-episodic. Therefore the present ways of screening for new AD treatments for AD in rodents are intrinsically unlikely to succeed. A new approach to preclinical screening would be to characterise the ADL of mice. Fortuitously, several such assays have recently been developed at Oxford, and here the three most sensitive and well-characterised are presented.Burrowing was first developed in Oxford 13. It evolved from a need to develop a mouse hoarding paradigm. Most published rodent hoarding paradigms required a distant food source to be linked to the home cage by a connecting passage. This would involve modifying the home cage as well as making a mouse-proof connecting passage and food source. So it was considered whether it would be possible to put the food source inside the cage. It was found that if a container was placed on the floor it was emptied by the next morning., The food pellets were, however, simply deposited in a heap at the container entrance, rather than placed in a discrete place away from the container, as might be expected if the mice were truly hoarding them. Close inspection showed that the mice were performing digging ("burrowing") movements, not carrying the pellets in their mouths to a selected place as they would if truly hoarding them.

ApoE2 Exaggerates PTSD-Related Behavioral, Cognitive, and Neuroendocrine Alterations

“…In mice, nest building has been used to assess distress and suffering, as well as hippocampal damage (Deacon et al, 2002) and neurodegeneration (Cramer et al, 2012;Wesson and Wilson, 2011), and may share neuropsychiatric features with measures of ADL (Deacon, 2012;Jirkof, 2014). We observed diminished nest building behavior in E2/E2 mice 2 days after fear conditioning.…”

“…Activities of daily living (ADL) are often disrupted during PTSD (Zatzick et al, 2008), and typical mouse behaviors such as nest building reflect general well-being and may share some psychiatric features with measures of ADL in humans (Deacon, 2012;Jirkof, 2014). CVS reduced nesting scores in all groups compared with baseline (Figures 3b and c) (Po0.05).…”

Deficiency of the Chromatin Regulator Brpf1 Causes Abnormal Brain Development

“…One nestlet cotton (3.0 g) was placed in each cage. The nests were assessed in the next morning on a 5-point scale as described (38). Digital cage photos were taken before and after the tests.…”

Nest building is impaired in the Ts65Dn mouse model of Down syndrome and rescued by blocking 5HT2a receptors

“…We hypothesized that this behavioral difference between the TS and 2N mice could be due to an environment and attention interaction that might be an important phenotypic trait of DS model mice. To investigate further, we used a standardized nest building assessment protocol using cotton Nestlets as standard, quantifiable building material along with a discrete scoring system for the utilization of the Nestlets and the quality of the resulting nests (Deacon, 2006(Deacon, , 2012. With this fine phenotyping method, we characterized the physiological, genetic, and neurochemical basis of nest building in TS mice.…”