An Inescapable Cat Odor Exposure Protocol for Studying Innate and Contextual Threat Conditioning in Rats
| Autor: | Francisco Ceric, Fernando Torrealba, María Rodríguez, Marco Contreras, Marcos Domic-Siede |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
General Chemical Engineering
Context (language use) General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology Neural activity chemistry.chemical_compound Animal model Cortex (anatomy) Conditioning Psychological medicine Animals Learning Behavior Animal General Immunology and Microbiology General Neuroscience Fear Rats medicine.anatomical_structure Odor Muscimol chemistry Predatory Behavior Odorants Conditioning Aversive Stimulus Psychology Neuroscience |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Visualized Experiments. |
| ISSN: | 1940-087X |
| DOI: | 10.3791/63078 |
| Popis: | Animals respond to threatening situations by exhibiting a number of defensive behaviors, including avoidance, freezing, and risk assessment. An animal model with an ethological approach offers a deeper insight into the biological mechanisms underlying threat responses. This paper describes a methodology to measure defensive behaviors toward both innate and learned aversive stimuli in rats. Animals were individually exposed to predator odor in an inescapable chamber to elicit a measurable, sustained, defensive state. The experimental design involved placing a rat in a familiar chamber for 10 min followed by exposure to cat odor for another 10 min in the same context. The next day, the rats were re-exposed for 10 min to the same context chamber where cat odor exposure occurred. Sessions were video-recorded and defensive behaviors were assessed on both days. The behavioral test was coupled with reversible functional inactivation and c-Fos immunohistochemistry techniques to determine the role of the interoceptive cortex in threat responses. Rats exposed to cat odor on the first day and re-exposed to the context chamber on the second day displayed higher levels of defensive behaviors, and that cat odor elicited a robust increase in the neural activity of the interoceptive cortex. Moreover, muscimol inactivation of the interoceptive cortex reduced the expression of defensive behaviors in response to cat odor and impaired contextual threat memory. These results show that this behavioral assay is a useful tool for studying neural mechanisms of defensive behaviors and may offer insight into mechanisms that mediate fear in humans and its related disorders. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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