The FVB/N mice: A well suited strain to study learning and memory ă processes using olfactory cues
authors
abstract
The FVB/N mice are well suited to generate transgenic animals. These ă mice are also particularly sensitive to seizures and neurodegeneration ă induced by systemic administration of chemoconvulsants and are very ă useful to model epilepsy. However, previous studies report strong ă cognitive and visual impairments suggesting this background unsuitable ă for behavioral analysis. In this study, we assessed and compared ă learning abilities of FVB/N mice to the well characterized C57BL/6 ă strain using the olfactory tubing maze, a non-visual ă hippocampus-dependent task in which the mice were trained to learn ă odor-reward associations. Exploratory behavior and spontaneous locomotor ă activity were then compared using the open field test. We demonstrated ă that FVB/N mice were able to learn the task, reaching at the end of the ă test a high percentage of correct responses. Interestingly, the ă performance of the FVB/N mice was at least similar to that of the ă C57BL/6 mice. Moreover, in contrast to previous reports, the FVB/N mice ă displayed a spontaneous locomotor activity lower than C57BL/6 mice. Our ă study demonstrated that FVB/N mice are not cognitively impaired and that ă their learning and memory performance can be assessed when the task is ă based on olfaction rather than vision. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights ă reserved.
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