Meeting Abstract
Modulation of Mouse Maternal Behavior by Pup Phenotype and Familiarity
By: Taran S. DePaola, Cathleen Rodda, and Jeffrey R. Alberts
The quantity and quality of maternal care is known to shape the course and outcome of offspring development, but less understood is whether and how offspring characteristics can affect the expression of maternal behavior. We observed and quantified the maternal behavior of C57BL/6J (C57) mouse dams as they interacted with pups in a controlled setting. Mouse dams were habituated to an observation cage with daily, 4-hr exposures to an illuminated chamber containing 60ml of home-cage bedding. In Experiment 1, habituated dams were presented with unfamiliar postnatal day (PD) 4 pups in the observation chamber for 3 hours. The next day, the dam’s own PD 5 pups were presented. Both sessions were video-recorded for analysis. Analyses suggest that dams displayed more maternal behaviors to their own pups than to unfamiliar C57 pups. In Experiment 2, C57 dams were similarly tested with oxytocin knock-out pups (OTKO) and wild type (WT) pups of the same strain (B6;129S). We found dams did not display differential maternal behaviors to the two types of pups. Results suggest, in addition to familiarity, pup phenotype can alter quantitative aspects of maternal behavior. Phenotypic differences in offspring can be associated with maternal behaviors exhibited by the mouse dam, and those maternal behaviors are in turn modulated by pup genotype and phenotype.
