Maternal transmission of social behavior in mice

Revealing the biological mechanisms underlying impaired social behavior associated with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) is one of the main challenges in the field of neuroscience. Addressing this challenge requires behavioral paradigms and experimental systems that typify social behavior of rodent models in a detailed and unbiased way. We have recently presented a novel experimental system for automated analysis of social behavior in rats and mice. We first used this system to compare social investigation behavior between the two main strains of laboratory mice and rats used in the field of neuroscience, Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats and C57BL/6J mice and found that these two strains exhibit marked differences in the dynamics of their social preference behavior. Specifically, SD male rats showed immediate strong motivation to interact with same-sex novel social stimulus while C57BL/6J mice exhibited only low level of social motivation at the beginning of an encounter with a novel conspecific. We then examined the dynamics of social behavior in two other strains of laboratory mice, CD-1 and BALB/c and found that their behavior resembled SD rats more than C57BL/6J mice, suggesting that C57BL/6J social behavior is an exception. Finally, when we crossed BALB/c and C57BL/6J mice and examined the social behavior of the offspring, we found that their dynamics of social behavior was determined by the strain of the mother. In conclusion, there are significant differences in social behavior between various strains of laboratory mice, and these differences seem to follow maternal transmission between generations.