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Differences in extinction of conditioned fear in C57BL/6 substrains are unrelated to expression of alpha-synuclein
- Source :
- Behavioural brain research. 157(2)
- Publication Year :
- 2004
-
Abstract
- C57BL/6 mice are commonly used as background strains for genetically modified mice, and little attention is usually paid to the notification of the specific substrain. However, it is known that C57BL/6NCrl (B6N) and C57BL/6JOlaHsd (B6JOla) mice differ in the course of extinction of conditioned fear (Stiedl O, Radulovic J, Lohmann R, Birkenfeld K, Palve M, Kammermeier J, et al. Strain and substrain differences in context- and tone-dependent fear conditioning of inbred mice. Behav Brain Res 1999;104:1-12), as well as in the expression of alpha-synuclein (Specht CG, Schoepfer R. Deletion of the alpha-synuclein locus in a subpopulation of C57BL/6J inbred mice. BMC Neurosci 2001;2:11). We tested for a causal relationship between the two findings by employing B6N (expressing alpha-synuclein), B6JOla (not expressing alpha-syn) and the third strain C57BL/6JCrl (B6Jax, expressing alpha-syn). We show that alpha-syn does not account for differences in extinction in a fear conditioning task, as its expression did not covary with the decrease of freezing on repeated non-reinforced tone and context exposure in the three strains: B6Jax exhibited fastest extinction followed by B6JOla. In contrast, B6N showed persistent fear over the course of extinction training. The differences in extinction between B6JOla and B6N were unrelated to sensorimotor processing (pain threshold and basal tone reaction) and innate fear (light-dark test). However, B6Jax displayed less innate fear than B6JOla and B6N. Our results of marked differences in innate and conditioned fear in three B6 substrains illustrate the necessity of a strict adherence to an exact mouse strain nomenclature.
- Subjects :
- C57BL/6
Male
medicine.medical_specialty
Genotype
Ratón
Conditioning, Classical
Synucleins
Nerve Tissue Proteins
Genetic determinism
Developmental psychology
Extinction, Psychological
Behavioral Neuroscience
Mice
Random Allocation
Inbred strain
Species Specificity
Reference Values
Internal medicine
Threshold of pain
medicine
Avoidance Learning
Animals
Fear conditioning
Freezing Reaction, Cataleptic
Pain Measurement
Analysis of Variance
biology
Classical conditioning
DNA
Fear
biology.organism_classification
Mice, Mutant Strains
Mice, Inbred C57BL
Endocrinology
Mutation
alpha-Synuclein
Anxiety
medicine.symptom
Psychology
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 01664328
- Volume :
- 157
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Behavioural brain research
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....20339076c3a160cc8df332de270d4144