ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2006
Stability of inbred mouse strain differences in behavior and brain size between laboratories and across decades.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 141 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
141 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Fecal microbiota transplantation from psychiatric patients to mice - systematic review of methodologies and a call for standardization.Translational psychiatry · 2026Pooled it
- A systematic review of the relationship between magnetic resonance imaging based resting-state and structural networks in the rodent brain.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- MidbrainbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A mouse organoid platform for modeling cerebral cortex development and cis-regulatory evolution in vitro.Developmental cell · 2025Article
- Hidden in plain sound: the scientific potential of house mouse squeaks.Biology letters · 2025Review
- Mice Recognise Mice in Neighbouring Rearing Cages and Change Their Social Behaviour.Behavioural neurology · 2024Article
- Exploring the similarities between risk factors triggering depression in humans and elevated in-cage "inactive but awake" behavior in laboratory mice.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2024Article
- A bespoke water T-maze apparatus and protocol: an optimized, reliable, and repeatable method for screening learning, memory, and executive functioning in laboratory mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Cyfip2 allelic variation in C57BL/6J and C57BL/6NJ mice alters free-choice ethanol drinking but not binge-like drinking or wheel-running activity.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2023Article
- Gene expression profiling reveals a role of immune system and inflammation in innate and stress-induced anxiety-like behavior.Frontiers in genetics · 2023Article
- IntelliCage: the development and perspectives of a mouse- and user-friendly automated behavioral test system.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Characterizing the behavioral and neuroendocrine features of susceptibility and resilience to social stress.Neurobiology of stress · 2022Article
- Alcohol-Drinking Under Limited-Access Procedures During Mature Adulthood Accelerates the Onset of Cognitive Impairment in Mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Long-term alcohol drinking in High Drinking in the Dark mice is stable for many months and does not show alcohol deprivation effects.Addiction biology · 2022Article
- Role of Environment and Experimenter in Reproducibility of Behavioral Studies With Laboratory Mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Research-Relevant Conditions and Pathology of Laboratory Mice, Rats, Gerbils, Guinea Pigs, Hamsters, Naked Mole Rats, and Rabbits.ILAR journal · 2021Review
- The impact of foot shock-induced stress on pain-related behavior associated with burn injury.Burns : journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries · 2021Article
- Article
- Supplier-origin mouse microbiomes significantly influence locomotor and anxiety-related behavior, body morphology, and metabolism.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Automation of training and testing motor and related tasks in pre-clinical behavioural and rehabilitative neuroscience.Experimental neurology · 2021Review
81 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
If we conduct the same experiment in two laboratories or repeat a classical study many years later, will we obtain the same results? Recent research with mice in neural and behavioral genetics yielded different results in different laboratories for certain phenotypes, and these findings suggested to some researchers that behavior may be too unstable for fine-scale genetic analysis. Here we expand the range of data on this question to additional laboratories and phenotypes, and, for the first time in this field, we formally compare recent data with experiments conducted 30-50 years ago. For ethanol preference and locomotor activity, strain differences have been highly stable over a period of 40-50 years, and most strain correlations are in the range of r = 0.85-0.98, as high as or higher than for brain weight. For anxiety-related behavior on the elevated plus maze, on the other hand, strain means often differ dramatically across laboratories or even when the same laboratory is moved to another site within a university. When a wide range of phenotypes is considered, no inbred strain appears to be exceptionally stable or labile across laboratories in any general sense, and there is no tendency to observe higher correlations among studies done more recently. Phenotypic drift over decades for most of the behaviors examined appears to be minimal.
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