Figure 8.

Male but not female mice exhibit blast-induced behavioral deficits at the one-month timepoint. Male and female mice did not differ on total distance traveled on the elevated zero maze 1-month post-blast exposure (A) but male blast mice spent significantly less time than their sham controls in the open arms (B). Only male blast mice showed impaired startle habituation (C) and prepulse inhibition (D, E) on the acoustic startle task. Male and female mice did not differ on total distance traveled in the conditioned odorant aversion posttest (F) but male blast showed an aversion to an odorant previously paired with blast-exposures (G). (H) Pearson correlation between bacterial taxa (taxa order that were significantly different between groups from Figure 4) and one-month behavioral parameters. (I) Heatmap of hierarchical clustering between individual mice vs. behavioral and microbiota composition (taxa order that were significantly different between groups from Figure 4). Each row is a mouse, each column is a parameter. Group column colors: sham female – dark blue; blast female – red; sham male – light blue; blast male yellow. Heatmap colors represent z-score for each parameter computed from all mice. n=12–18. Two-way ANOVA Šídák post-hoc analysis (A-G). *p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤ 0.01, ****p ≤ 0.0001, ns = not significant. Values represent mean ± SEM.