It has been suggested that AD is more common in human female population and disease progression is more aggressive in female 3xTg mouse model. However 3xTg males seem to be used quite often in studies as well.
I'm planning to do some behavioral tests on 3xTg mice, there are reports on hyperactivity in aged females, and that estrus cycling may confound assessment of disease-related behavioral dysfunction. I'm not sure if there are any other special concerns with this model regarding the choice of gender.
Also Jax warned that male 3xTg transgenic mice may not exhibit the phenotypic traits originally described, thus I might have to use females since I’m going to purchase from Jax.
Does anyone have experience with this model? How are the females doing in behavioral tests and what are the concerns?
Thanks.
Typically, behavior test should be done for both gender mice. If there is any discrepancy occur during test which possibly link to gender, you should look for mechanism behind. For biochemical experiments, some studies focus only on female mice, but for behavior you should include both gender.
I'm not sure how you would examine sexual dimorphism without using both sexes. Traditionally, people avoided using female because of the estrous confound. There are articles out there demonstrating that estrous does play a role in different behaviours in given strains but not all stains exhibit the same alterations due to estrous so it would be important to look up what's Ajaey there. I'm also not sure if female mice stop cycling as they get older and I'm not aware of any papers that address that question (not that they're not out there, I've just never looked or cone across it). I'll try to link a paper or two when I find them but if I remember, rats and D2 show changes in certain assays. Cd1 and B6 show different changes than rats and D2. Basically, it's very stain dependent and you'll want to look for info on your background stain.
Jordan: thank you! your papers have been helpful. actually I'm not testing sexual dimorphism, I just wondered how it would affect 3xTg mice behavior so I can choose proper mice for experiment, maybe I didn't make it clear enough in the question title. I understand this effect differ from strain to strain and that's why I asked about 3xTg here.
Hi,
in many transgenic Alzheimer model mice and in human, females are affected more. E.g. Tg2576 (Schilling et al. 2008), 5XFAD (Bhattacharya et al. 2014)
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