Assessing sociability using the Three-Chamber Social Interaction Test and the Reciprocal Interaction Test in a genetic mouse model of ASD

• Published in: Behavioral and brain functions 2024-09, Vol.20 (1), p.24-6, Article 24
• Main Authors: Szabó, Jakub, Renczés, Emese, Borbélyová, Veronika, Ostatníková, Daniela, Celec, Peter
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animals; Autism; Autism Spectrum Disorder - genetics; Autism Spectrum Disorder - psychology; Behavior, Animal - physiology; Behavioral phenotyping; Disease Models, Animal; Female; Male; Mice; Mice, Inbred C57BL; Mice, Knockout; Microfilament Proteins - genetics; Nerve Tissue Proteins - genetics; Phelan-McDermid syndrome; Social Behavior; Social Interaction
• ISSN: 1744-9081; 1744-9081
• DOI: 10.1186/s12993-024-00251-0

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a group of neurodevelopmental disorders with heterogeneous symptomatology. Arguably, the most pervasive shortfall of ASD are the deficits in sociability and the animal models of the disorder are expected to exhibit such impairments. The most widely utilized behavioral task for assessing sociability in rodents is the Three-Chamber Social Interaction Test (SIT). However, SIT has been yielding inconsistent results in social interaction behavior across different rodent models of ASD, which could be pointing to the suboptimal methodology of the task. Here, we compared social behavior assessed in SIT and in another prominent sociability behavioral assay, Reciprocal Interaction Test (RCI), in a SH3 and multiple ankyrin repeated domains 3 (SHANK3) mouse model of ASD. Head-to-head comparison showed no association (p = 0.15, 0.25, 0.43) and a fixed bias (p = 0.01,