I would like to adapt the warm spot competition test to assess the social hierarchy in groups of mice. This assay has been described in the Zhou et al., 2017 in Science (Paper attached: History of winning remodels thalamo-PFC circuit to reinforce social dominance).
My main question is: would you trust this test to assess social hierarchy alone (without an additional hierarchy assessment like the tube test or urinary marking test)?
Secondly, does anyone has some advice on the protocol (marking B6J mice for visual scoring or equipment to use for consistent cold vs. warm between trials, video tracking solutions for video scoring...)?
Thanks in advance!
Damien
Hi Damien Huzard , not sure as to the reliability of the test with out additional social hierarchy assessments, as that is not my area of expertise, but I can attest to how to automatically analyze this using video tracking. My experience is with Noldus EthoVision (used it in my dissertation and currently work at Noldus). This would be a simple analysis, just put a zone of interest around the warm spot. Then you can look at total time spent in the zone, number of entries to the zone and latency to first enter the zone. You could also use a heat map to visualize time spent in the zone vs rest of the arena.
Since there are multiple mice in the arena at once, and you want to know how much time each type spends in the warm zone, I would definitely recommend color marking each animal. With optimal detection settings, it is possible to analyze this without color marking, however if the mice climb over each other it is possible for the identities in the software to switch. I am not aware of any software/ai/algorithm that can successfully and consistently prevent this. Since climbing over each other is common in social tasks, I think color marking would be your best option. There are quite a few ways to do this with B6 mice.