Behavioural phenotyping assays for mouse models of autism

By Jill L. Silverman, Mu Yang, Catherine Lord, J. Crawley. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2010

1,424 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Autism is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder of unknown aetiology that affects 1 in 100–150 individuals. Diagnosis is based on three categories of behavioural criteria: abnormal social interactions, communication deficits and repetitive behaviours. Strong evidence for a genetic basis has prompted the development of mouse models with targeted mutations in candidate genes for autism. As the diagnostic criteria for autism are behavioural, phenotyping these mouse models requires behavioural assays with high relevance to each category of the diagnostic symptoms. Behavioural neuroscientists are generating a comprehensive set of assays for social interaction, communication and repetitive behaviours to test hypotheses about the causes of austism. Robust phenotypes in mouse models hold great promise as translational tools for discovering effective treatments for components of autism spectrum disorders.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b6b0244f7017cc27da2534242e4384308bcf48f

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Citations in the corpus

Absence of CNTNAP2 leads to epilepsy, neuronal migration abnormalities and core autism-related deficits (2011, positive): “Cntnap2 / Mice Show Communication and Social Behavior Abnormalities Isolation-induced ultrasonic vocalizations (UsVs) are distress calls emitted by pups when separated from their mother, representing an infant-mother vocal communicative behavior that is thought to be relevant to ASD (Crawley, 2007; ”
The microbiota modulates gut physiology and behavioral abnormalities associated with autism (2013, neutral): “related impairments in social interaction (Silverman et al., 2010).”
Maternal immune activation yields offspring displaying mouse versions of the three core symptoms of autism (2012, background): “Self-grooming can provide another index of repetitive/stereotypic behavior in rodents (Silverman et al., 2010).”
Drosophila strategies to study psychiatric disorders. (2013, background): “The latest behavioural endophenotyping assays for rodent models of different psychiatric disorders have been discussed extensively elsewhere [52,89,149,183].”
Microbial reconstitution reverses maternal diet-induced social and synaptic deficits in offspring (2016, positive): “Next, we used the three-chamber test (Silverman et al., 2010) to assess (1) sociability by comparing the time mice spent interacting with an empty wire cage versus one containing amouse and (2) preference for social novelty bymeasuring the time mice spent interacting with a familiar versus a strange”
Human Gut Microbiota from Autism Spectrum Disorder Promote Behavioral Symptoms in Mice (2019, methodology): “To test the behavioral effects of 5AV and taurine, we employed the BTBR T tf/J (BTBR) mouse model that displays ASD-related behavioral changes (McFarlane et al., 2008; Meyza and Blanchard, 2017; Moy et al., 2007; Silverman et al., 2010).”