Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Aldana Charo Sánchez Sanda | email: alducharo@gmail.com
Aldana Sanchez Sanda 1°, Agostina Sacson 1°, Pedro Bekinschtein 1°, Noelia Weisstaub 1°
1° Laboratorio de Memoria y Cognición Molecular, Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva y Traslacional, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas(CONICET)-Fundación INECO-Universidad Favaloro
Serotonergic signaling appears to play a key role in the generation and modulation of a broad array of behaviors, including addiction, aggression and affect. Serotonin type 2A receptors (5-HT2AR) are involved in a wide variety of cognitive and emotional functions. Moreover, these receptors has been linked with the social deficits presented in some psychiatric disorders like Autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. Also, it was found that 5-HT2AR is involved in the prosocial effects of some drugs, such as LSD. In recent studies in our lab, knockout mice lacking the 5-HT2AR (htr2a-/-) show decreased discrimination indexes in the three-chambers social interaction test (SI) compared with wild types (htr2a+/+) controls. But it’s unknown if the deficit in this test is due to a motivational issue or if a more ecological task can show specific patterns of behavior in htr2a-/- mice. For this purpose, we used htr2a-/- and htr2a+/+ mice, and performed a free social interaction test (Free SI) and a conditioned place preference (CPP) test to measure social interactions in a direct way and to test social motivation respectively. In the CPP test, we didn’t find significant differences between genotypes which indicates that the deficit seen in htr2a-/- mice might not be due to a lack of social motivation. Preliminary analysis on the Free SI suggested a similar difference to the one observed in the three-chambers SI task.