Cage position within an animal-room rack is among the most routine housing decisions, yet it shapes both ambient illumination and husbandry contact. We asked whether this alone, in naive, untreated mice, alters adult behavior. Male and female ICR mice were housed from birth to adulthood on the uppermost or lowermost rack shelf.
Lower-shelf mice left the dark compartment of the light-dark box faster, the only difference surviving correction, and showed less risk-assessment behavior in the elevated plus maze in both cohorts. Spatial memory, locomotor activity, nociception and ultrasound-measured optic nerve diameter showed no detectable difference, despite 70 versus 20 lx in-cage illumination. Lower-shelf mice showed greater novel-object preference, but not once cage clustering was modeled.
Here, we show that cage position is associated with altered exploratory behavior in animals given no experimental manipulation, potentially identifying a hidden confounder that counterbalancing can remove. This research was partly funded by the Ari and Regine Aprijaskis Fund (grant number 347300-00) and the Dr. Adelson Center for the Biology of Addictive Diseases (grant number 601133461).
Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 6997801, Israel Lee Keidan, Lior Sasonov & Chaim G. Pick Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel Dr. Adelson Chair and Center for the Biology of Addictive Diseases, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 6997801, Israel Myers Neuro-Behavioral Core Facility, Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 6997801, Israel The authors declare no competing interests.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
