Sex differences in avoidance behavior after perceiving potential risk in mice

Abstract

BackgroundSex has been considered as a potential factor regulating individual behaviors in different contexts. Recently, findings on sex differences in the neuroendocrine circuit have expanded due to exact measurements and control of neuronal activity, while findings on sex differences in behavioral phenotypes are limited. One efficient way to determine the miscellaneous aspects of a sexually different behavior is to segment it into a set of simpler responses induced by discrete scenes.MethodsIn the present study, we conducted a battery of behavioral tests within a variety of unique risky scenes, to determine where and how sex differences arise in responses under those scenes.ResultsA significant sex difference was observed in the avoidance responses measured in the two-way active and the passive avoidance tests. The phenotype observed was higher mobility in male mice and reduced mobility in female mice, and required associative learning between an escapable risk and its predictive cue. This was limited in other scenes where escapable risk or predictive cue or both were missing.ConclusionsTaken together, the present study found that the primary sex difference occurs in mobility in the avoidance response after perceiving escapable risks.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12993-017-0126-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Sex and Time-of-Day Impact on Anxiety and Passive Avoidance Memory Strategies in Mice

“…Similarly, other studies performed at some points of the beginning-middle [ZT2-ZT5 (Võikar et al, 2001) and ZT3.5-6.5 (Huang et al, 2017)] or middle-end period of the light phase [ZT5-10 (Salari and Amani, 2017)] revealed no significant differences between male and female mice in parameters tested in the light-dark test. These findings were also confirmed by some other studies that did not specify the exact period of the light phase when the experiments were performed (Ding et al, 2014;Tucker et al, 2017;Yokota et al, 2017). During the dark phase, Barreto-Estrada et al (2004) demonstrated that there were no sex differences in the light-dark transition.…”

“…In addition to the above, most of the studies have suggested that there are no sex differences in PA memory in mice tested during the light (Rayburn et al, 2001;Rizk et al, 2005;Benice et al, 2006;Fernandes-Santos et al, 2012;Balsevich et al, 2014;Zanos et al, 2015;Dachtler et al, 2016;Maurice et al, 2016;Jardim et al, 2017;Adelöf et al, 2019) and dark phase of the 12/12 cycle (Podhorna et al, 2002;Xu et al, 2011;Parra et al, 2013). In contrast, Xu et al (2013) found that female ICR mice tested at ZT2-7 showed shorter latency than males on the retention trial in the step-down PA test, while Yokota et al (2017) found that female C57BL/6N mice displayed significantly longer latency to enter into the dark chamber of the step-through PA task than the male counterparts. The data from the present study showed that female mice performed significantly better than males at the ZT0-2.5 while at the ZT9.5-12 there were no sex differences in the PA latency.…”

“…With respect to PA learning, no sex differences were found in Swiss (Fernandes-Santos et al, 2012;Jardim et al, 2017), C57BL/6NxBALB/c (Adelöf et al, 2019), C57BL/6J (Benice et al, 2006;Zanos et al, 2015), C57BL/6N (Dachtler et al, 2016), 129 Sv (Maurice et al, 2016), C57BL/6 (Podhorna et al, 2002;Ding et al, 2014), C57BL/6J (B6; Rizk et al, 2005;Balsevich et al, 2014), CD1 (Rayburn et al, 2001;Parra et al, 2013), or NMRI mice (Lamberty and Gower, 1988). Furthermore, Yokota et al (2017) found that female C57BL/6N mice express a significantly longer latency to enter into the dark chamber of the PA task than their male counterparts.…”

“…Although female C57BL/J6 mice exhibited longer latency than males to enter the dark chamber in the light-dark test (Adamec et al, 2006), most of the studies have proven that there are no sex differences in the time that animals spent in the dark compartment among the following strains of mice: C57BL/6J (Adamec et al, 2006;Huang et al, 2017;Tucker et al, 2017), C57BL/6 (Ding et al, 2014), C57BL/6N (Yokota et al, 2017), NMRI (Salari and Amani, 2017), 1129S2/SvHsd, and C57BL/6JOlaHsd mice (Võikar et al, 2001). However, some other studies have suggested that female C57BL/6J (Carreira et al, 2017) and Swiss-Kunming strain (Guo et al, 2004) mice show higher preferences for the dark compartment.…”

Hippocampal calpain is required for the consolidation and reconsolidation but not extinction of contextual fear memory

“…The mice were handled for 5 consecutive days prior to the commencement of contextual fear conditioning. The mice were trained and tested in conditioning chambers (17.5 × 17.5 × 15 cm; O’HARA & Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan) that had a stainless-steel grid floor through which the footshock could be delivered [ 15 , 48 , 60 , 61 , 78 , 82 , 83 ]. Training consisted of placing the mice in the chamber and delivering an unsignaled footshock (2 s duration, 0.4 mA) 148 s later.…”