Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition.

ABSTRACT: Social recognition (SR) enables rodents to distinguish between familiar and novel conspecifics, largely through individual odor cues. SR tasks utilize the tendency for a male to sniff and interact with a novel individual more than a familiar individual. Many paradigms have been used to study the roles of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in SR. However, inconsistencies in results have arisen within similar mouse strains, and across different paradigms and laboratories, making reliable testing of SR difficult. The current protocol details a novel approach that is replicable across investigators and in different strains of mice. We created a protocol that uses gonadally intact, singly housed females presented within corrals to group-housed males. Housing females singly before testin

SUBMITTER: Macbeth AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3018731 | biostudies-literature | 2009

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature