Effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust

The behavior of animals is intricately linked to the environment; a Background: relationship that is often studied in laboratory conditions by using environmental perturbations to study biological mechanisms underlying the behavioral change. This study pertains to two such well-studied and well-replicated Methods: perturbations, i.e., stress-induced anxiogenesis and Toxoplasma-induced loss of innate fear. Here, we demonstrate that behavioral outcomes of these experimental manipulations are contingent upon the ambient quality of the wider environment where animal facilities are situated. During late 2014 and early 2015, a building construction project Results: started adjacent to our animal facility. During this phase, we observed that maternal separation stress caused anxiolysis, rather than historically observed anxiogenesis, in laboratory rats. We also found that Toxoplasma infection caused an increase, rather than historically observed decrease, in innate aversion to predator odors in rats. These observations suggest that effects of stress and Conclusion: Toxoplasma are dependent on variables in the environment that often go unreported in the published literature. Rupshi Mitra ( ) Corresponding author: [email protected] : Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing – Original Draft Preparation; : Conceptualization, Investigation, Author roles: Abdulai-Saiku S Hegde A Writing – Original Draft Preparation; : Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing; Vyas A Mitra : Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing R No competing interests were disclosed. Competing interests: Abdulai-Saiku S, Hegde A, Vyas A and Mitra R. How to cite this article: Effects of stress or infection on rat behavior show robust reversals 2017, :2097 (doi: due to environmental disturbance [version 1; referees: awaiting peer review] F1000Research 6 ) 10.12688/f1000research.13171.1 © 2017 Abdulai-Saiku S . This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the , Copyright: et al Creative Commons Attribution Licence which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Data associated with the article are available under the terms of the (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication). Creative Commons Zero "No rights reserved" data waiver This work was financially supported by Ministry of Education, Singapore (grant RG136/15 and RG 46/12). Grant information: The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 06 Dec 2017, :2097 (doi: ) First published: 6 10.12688/f1000research.13171.1 * *