Girls gone wild: Social isolation induces hyperactivity and exploration in aged female mice

D. Gregory Sullens; Kayla Gilley; Kendall Jensen; Melanie J. Sekeres

. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.15.043877 doi: bioRxiv preprint 3 At 18 months of age, home cages of mice were randomly divided into group-housed (n=20 mice) and singlehoused social isolation conditions (n=20 mice). For subjects assigned to the social isolation condition, each mouse was individually housed in a standard shoebox cage with bedding and nesting materials, ad libitum access to food and water, in ventilated racks in the rodent vivarium for one month. At the end of the one-month isolation period, mice remained in their assigned housing conditions and began a post-rearing behavioral test battery to assess anxiety-like and depressive-like behavior and contextual fear memory (see Figure 1a for experimental timeline).