Automatically annotated motion tracking identifies a distinct social behavioral profile following chronic social defeat stress



Bordes, Joeri, Miranda, Lucas, Reinhardt, Maya, Narayan, Sowmya, Hartmann, Jakob, Newman, Emily L, Brix, Lea Maria, van Doeselaar, Lotte, Engelhardt, Clara, Dillmann, Larissa
et al (show 6 more authors) (2023) Automatically annotated motion tracking identifies a distinct social behavioral profile following chronic social defeat stress. NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, 14 (1). 4319-.

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Abstract

Severe stress exposure increases the risk of stress-related disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD). An essential characteristic of MDD is the impairment of social functioning and lack of social motivation. Chronic social defeat stress is an established animal model for MDD research, which induces a cascade of physiological and behavioral changes. Current markerless pose estimation tools allow for more complex and naturalistic behavioral tests. Here, we introduce the open-source tool DeepOF to investigate the individual and social behavioral profile in mice by providing supervised and unsupervised pipelines using DeepLabCut-annotated pose estimation data. Applying this tool to chronic social defeat in male mice, the DeepOF supervised and unsupervised pipelines detect a distinct stress-induced social behavioral pattern, which was particularly observed at the beginning of a novel social encounter and fades with time due to habituation. In addition, while the classical social avoidance task does identify the stress-induced social behavioral differences, both DeepOF behavioral pipelines provide a clearer and more detailed profile. Moreover, DeepOF aims to facilitate reproducibility and unification of behavioral classification by providing an open-source tool, which can advance the study of rodent individual and social behavior, thereby enabling biological insights and, for example, subsequent drug development for psychiatric disorders.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Animals, Mice, Inbred C57BL, Rodentia, Mice, Reproducibility of Results, Behavior, Animal, Stress, Psychological, Social Behavior, Depressive Disorder, Major, Male, Social Defeat
Divisions: Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Population Health
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 26 Sep 2023 08:57
Last Modified: 26 Sep 2023 08:58
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40040-3
Open Access URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40040-3
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3173042