发布: 2018年12月20日第8卷第24期 DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3120 浏览次数: 7077
评审: HSIU CHUN CHUANGDavid F DelotterieAnonymous reviewer(s)
Abstract
The formation of social relationships via social interactions and memory are essential for one’s physical and mental health. To date, rodent studies have used the three-chamber social approach test to measure social approach, social novelty, and social memory. In recent years, techniques including optogenetics have been developed to acutely control the activity of genetically defined populations of neurons. Recent studies have even combined optogenetics with advanced temporal gene expression control systems to label certain populations of neurons during learning and subsequently reactivated for memory testing. We combined optogenetic targeting with the three-chamber social approach test to examine particular neural circuits of interest during social memory encoding or retrieval. First, we stereotaxically infected specific brain areas with viral-encoding opsins that acutely activate or inhibit the firing of the neurons. Next, we subjected the mice to the three-chamber behavioral paradigm while delivering light during social memory encoding or retrieval. Lastly, the mice were tested with the delivery of light in a counter-balanced manner which allows each subject to be its own internal control. Thus, the optogenetic stimulation coupled with the three-chamber social approach test is a well-validated paradigm to explore the contribution of diverse brain circuits in various social cognition processes.
Keywords: Social approach (社交途径)Background
Social cognition is essential to our mental health. Deficits in social interaction and memory are hallmark characteristics in numerous brain disorders. Social working memory is an extremely dynamic process that is often unpredictable and requires constant adaptability to the changing stimuli (Lieberman, 2007). Specifically, it is a cognitive process that involves the encoding, storage, and retrieval of socially salient information. Traditional human and primate studies using imaging and lesion experiments, have implicated the medial temporal lobe in social cognitive tasks including social recognition and context evaluation (Insel and Fernad, 2004; Olson et al., 2013; Sandi and Haller, 2015). However, these previous studies employed toxins which caused extensive damage to broad areas in the brain and have limited the control of targeted cell types and subcellular compartments. Recent studies employing acute optogenetic approaches have implicated various brain regions and circuits, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and ventral tegmental area to play a critical role in the different facets of social behavior, including social interactions, approach, and discrimination memory (Felix-Ortiz and Tye, 2014; Gunaydin et al., 2014; Hitti and Siegelbaum, 2014; Okuyama et al., 2016).
To investigate the behavioral significance of a particular brain region in social memory processing, subject mice can be evaluated on their performance in a well-validated three-chamber social approach paradigm (Nadler et al., 2004). In this test, the subject mouse is habituated to the apparatus (stage 1). Then it is first introduced to a novel stranger mouse (S1) to evaluate memory formation and sociability (stage 2), and subsequently presented to a second novel stranger mouse (S2) to test social recognition memory and retrieval (stage 3). The amount of time the mouse spends investigating the stranger mice is recorded. Wild-type mice spend more time exploring a novel stranger mouse compared to a familiar conspecific. Therefore, combined with optogenetic targeting, specific neural circuits can be activated or inhibited during the various stages including memory formation (encoding) or retrieval (discrimination). Furthermore, the use of optogenetics can also identify particular genes in the neural circuits that may be involved in the regulation of sociability and/or social recognition memory in mice (Leung et al., 2018).
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版权信息
© 2018 The Authors; exclusive licensee Bio-protocol LLC.
如何引用
Leung, C., Kim, J. C. and Jia, Z. (2018). Three-chamber Social Approach Task with Optogenetic Stimulation (Mice). Bio-protocol 8(24): e3120. DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3120.
分类
神经科学 > 行为神经科学 > 学习和记忆
神经科学 > 神经系统疾病 > 动物模型
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