Do I turn left or right? Effects of sex, age, experience and exit route on maze test performance in sheep

Hunter, Damien S.; Hazel, Susan J.; Kind, Karen L.; Liu, Hong; Marini, Danila; Owens, Julie A.; Pitcher, Julia B.; Gatford, Kathryn L.

doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2014.11.037

Cited by 17 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Simple maze tests based on those used in sheep for a number of applications, [33][34][35][36][37] including spatial learning and memory studies, 13 became a valuable adjunct to the clinical studies. Pre-clinically treated sheep retained their ability to navigate the maze well beyond the age at which untreated CLN5 À/À sheep could not, at traverse times even faster than the unaffected cohort, possibly because they were more habituated to the food reward than the pasture-raised controls.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Longitudinal In Vivo Monitoring of the CNS Demonstrates the Efficacy of Gene Therapy in a Sheep Model of CLN5 Batten Disease

et al. 2018

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Neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (NCLs; Batten disease) are neurodegenerative lysosomal storage diseases predominantly affecting children. Single administration of brain-directed lentiviral or recombinant single-stranded adeno-associated virus 9 (ssAAV9) vectors expressing ovine CLN5 into six pre-clinically affected sheep with a naturally occurring CLN5 NCL resulted in long-term disease attenuation. Treatment efficacy was demonstrated by non-invasive longitudinal in vivo monitoring developed to align with assessments used in human medicine. The treated sheep retained neurological and cognitive function, and one ssAAV9-treated animal has been retained and is now 57 months old, almost triple the lifespan of untreated CLN5-affected sheep. The onset of visual deficits was much delayed. Computed tomography and MRI showed that brain structures and volumes remained stable. Because gene therapy in humans is more likely to begin after clinical diagnosis, self-complementary AAV9-CLN5 was injected into the brain ventricles of four 7-month-old affected sheep already showing early clinical signs in a second trial. This also halted disease progression beyond their natural lifespan. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of CLN5 gene therapy, using three different vector platforms, in a large animal model and, thus, the prognosis for human translation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Longitudinal In Vivo Monitoring of the CNS Demonstrates the Efficacy of Gene Therapy in a Sheep Model of CLN5 Batten Disease

et al. 2018

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“…For example, in T and Y-maze tasks sheep rapidly acquire bias towards entering one arm 363 preferentially and become averse to entering the other maze arm in reversal tasks [122,168,169].…”

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confidence: 99%

Programming the brain: Common outcomes and gaps in knowledge from animal studies of IUGR

Hunter

Hazel

Kind

et al. 2016

Physiology & Behavior

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After the embargo period via non-commercial hosting platforms such as their institutional repository  via commercial sites with which Elsevier has an agreement In all cases accepted manuscripts should: link to the formal publication via its DOI  bear a CC-BY-NC-ND license -this is easy to do, click here to find out how  if aggregated with other manuscripts, for example in a repository or other site, be shared in alignment with our hosting policy  not be added to or enhanced in any way to appear more like, or to substitute for, the published journal article

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“…As an alternative to food rewards, some social species may be rewarded socially by providing access to conspecifics—for example fish ( 30 ) and sheep ( 20 ) in maze-based tasks. Introducing conspecifics may mitigate some of the confounding factors of using appetitive rewards, but social reinforcers bring complications of their own.…”

Section: Factors Contributing To Individual Variation In Cognitive Pementioning

confidence: 99%

Factors Influencing Individual Variation in Farm Animal Cognition and How to Account for These Statistically

et al. 2018

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For farmed species, good health and welfare is a win-win situation: both the animals and producers can benefit. In recent years, animal welfare scientists have embraced cognitive sciences to rise to the challenge of determining an animal's internal state in order to better understand its welfare needs and by extension, the needs of larger groups of animals. A wide range of cognitive tests have been developed that can be applied in farmed species to assess a range of cognitive traits. However, this has also presented challenges. Whilst it may be expected to see cognitive variation at the species level, differences in cognitive ability between and within individuals of the same species have frequently been noted but left largely unexplained. Not accounting for individual variation may result in misleading conclusions when the results are applied both at an individual level and at higher levels of scale. This has implications both for our fundamental understanding of an individual's welfare needs, but also more broadly for experimental design and the justification for sample sizes in studies using animals. We urgently need to address this issue. In this review, we will consider the latest developments on the causes of individual variation in cognitive outcomes, such as the choice of cognitive test, sex, breed, age, early life environment, rearing conditions, personality, diet, and the animal's microbiome. We discuss the impact of each of these factors specifically in relation to recent work in farmed species, and explore the future directions for cognitive research in this field, particularly in relation to experimental design and analytical techniques that allow individual variation to be accounted for appropriately.

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Do I turn left or right? Effects of sex, age, experience and exit route on maze test performance in sheep

Cited by 17 publications

References 42 publications

Longitudinal In Vivo Monitoring of the CNS Demonstrates the Efficacy of Gene Therapy in a Sheep Model of CLN5 Batten Disease

Longitudinal In Vivo Monitoring of the CNS Demonstrates the Efficacy of Gene Therapy in a Sheep Model of CLN5 Batten Disease

Programming the brain: Common outcomes and gaps in knowledge from animal studies of IUGR

Factors Influencing Individual Variation in Farm Animal Cognition and How to Account for These Statistically

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