Maternal Deprivation in Early Ontogeny Impairs Olfactory Learning with Mother’s Grooming Imitation in 129Sv Mice

Abstract

Early experience, mediated by mother's care, exerts long-term effects on the formation of behavioral phenotype. However, there are no published data on the effects of such experience on the results of early learning. We investigated the effects of maternal deprivation associated with handling in 129Sv mice during postnatal days 3-6 on the results of olfactory learning with mother's grooming imitation used as the reinforcement on postnatal day 8. Mother deprivation and handling procedure are shown to impair early olfactory learning.

Effects of early-life stress and HDAC inhibition on maternal behavior in mice.

“…First, it is important to take into account findings when performing different experimental manipulations on pups, if these procedures require brief pup removal from the mother or subcutaneous injections in the early postnatal period. Second, our model of MS could be suggested as a translational model for the study of mechanisms of alterations of exploratory behavior, induced by disturbances in the mother-infant relationship, because of similarities between our data on the impairment of the attachment learning in the pups subjected to MS (Burenkova, Aleksandrova, & Zarayskaya, 2012). This predicted the decrease of exploratory behavior in the present work, and the data of Mary D. Salter Ainsworth and colleagues revealed the relationship between the level of exploratory behavior and attachment style in both children (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) and adults (Green & Campbell, 2000).…”

The role of epigenetic mechanisms in the long‐term effects of early‐life adversity and mother–infant relationship on physiology and behavior of offspring in laboratory rats and mice

“…In addition to natural variations of maternal care, experimental manipulations with maternal–child relationships during the early postnatal period could also be critical for the future physiological and behavioral phenotype of the offspring. This has been shown in a number of studies using experimental models of offspring handling (Caldji et al., 2000; Lesuis et al., 2017), deprivation (Llorente‐Berzal et al., 2012), or separation (Burenkova et al., 2014a, 2012, 2019; Caldji et al., 2000; Franklin et al., 2010) of offspring from the mother, maternal stress (Blaze & Roth, 2017), and others (Davis et al., 2020). Handling (3–15 min separation of pups from the mother) usually has a favorable effect on the future emotional (level of anxiety assessed in the neophagia test, elevated plus maze, open field test, and others) and cognitive characteristics (performance on learning and memory tasks) of the offspring.…”

“…However, the long‐term consequences of such procedures are practically not studied, which complicates the interpretation of the results of behavioral phenotyping of adult animals that had experienced testing in longitudinal experiments in the early postnatal period. In this regard, a model of daily intermediate length of 45‐min MS from the third to the sixth postnatal day (PND) has been developed; this procedure was shown to induce stress in pups on both hormonal and behavioral levels (Burenkova et al., 2020) and impair olfactory discrimination learning task with imitation of maternal grooming as positive reinforcement at the PND8 (Burenkova et al., 2012) that can be explained by alterations in maternal behavior caused by MS (Burenkova et al., 2020). This early‐life experience also negatively affected contextual fear memory formation in adult male offspring subjected to brief MS, though no effect on their emotionality tested in the open field test or elevated plus‐maze test was observed (Burenkova et al., 2014a).…”