Determining Social Dominance Behavior in Mice

Sabina Celnik

Teacher: Dr. Rosen/Mr. Johnson

Mentor: Dr. Gul Dolen and Dr. Eastman Lewis

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that occurs in humans where social deficits are a core diagnostic criteria. Mice can be used to model Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), a disorder similar to autism in humans. To develop an assay to measure typical and atypical social behaviors in adult mice and better understand what changes in brain function could contribute to social deficits in adults with autism, an easily testable behavior is needed. Social dominance is an appropriate behavior because hierarchies are the foundation of cooperation between organisms. To determine if the tube test assay is a reliable measure of social dominance in mice, the tube test will be run on pairs of mice. To test its validity, the tube test results will be compared to those of the urine dominance assay. The tube test was run on 11 pairs of mice. Of the groups tested, 7 had results which demonstrated a clear dominant and subordinate mice based on the classical interpretation of the tube test. No results were obtained for the remaining four groups as the mice refused to enter the tube test apparatus. When the results of the tube test were compared to those of the urine-marking assay, only 3/7 groups tested had results that supported the validity of the tube test as classically interpreted. These results indicate that the tube test assay is not appropriate to determine dominance in mice, deeming us unable to use it as a behavioral test to validate potential autism treatments.