Autistic mice @ Bryan Research Building room 103
Today’s talk was by Dr. Jacqueline N. Crawley titled : “Mouse Models of Autism to Test Hypotheses and Discover Treatments” . Dr.Crawley talked about sociability autism on one side of the spectrum and williams syndrome on the other . In her lab they use BTBR knockout mice.
“BTBR mice exhibit a 100% absence of the corpus callosum and a severly reduced hippocampal commissure (Wahlsten D, 2003 Brain Res). This strain exhibits several symptoms of autism including: reduced social interactions, impaired play, low exploratory behavior, unusual vocalizations and high anxiety as compared to other inbred strains”
http://jaxmice.jax.org/strain/002282.html
This strain shows repetitive self grooming behavior, fails at Morris water maze and doesn’t show interest in other mice.They also are indifferent to social olfactory cues (always remember what smell is to mice is vision to humans). Scent marking (if there’s female urine somewhere go pee there) in an open field is also in KO mice than B6 strain. KO is less active against social cues.
As a part of this research Dr.Crawley also recorded ultrasonic vocalizations of the BTBR mice. Squeaks of BTBR once converted to human auditory range(16x slower) sounds like birds singing which really struck me. She played audio samples and showed 10 different categories of pup separation calls as audio patterns signifying different moods/conditions.
here’s two questions raised by this research:
1.Are calls quantitative and replicable enough to use as an assay?
2.Can these calls be considered as communication?
Seconda me, hell yes, these calls ARE communication, and they freaking sound like bird songs. To sum up, the research looked at open air locomotion, social olfactory cues and separation calls (really loud/intense calls shown by BTBR mice , Dr.Crawley said this is not comparable to human autism since humans tend to either be very silent or very loud).
