Figure 5: cKO mice display increased exploratory drive.

A) Experimental design: mice were placed in a cylindrical arena with a single odor inlet near the bottom, and exposed to two consecutive phases, where either a neutral (Blank) or an aversive (TMT) smell was pumped into the arena. B) Occupancy plots showing the average proportion of experiment time spent in each location throughout the arena by WT (n = 15 males, 13 females) or cKO (n = 14 males, 10 females) mice, under blank odor (“Blank”) or anxiogenic (“TMT”) conditions, as well as the difference between both plots (“cKO-WT”), separated by sex (top, males; bottom, females). C) Plot displaying the average occupancy of the area around the odor inlet (within a 40 mm radius) during Blank (gray triangles) and TMT (golden triangles) conditions, separated by sex and genotype. Each line joins the occupancy values of an individual mouse. Bars indicate the average. Note the same range in the y-axis of males and females. Paired t-tests (Blank vs. TMT) and unpaired t-tests (WT vs. cKO) were performed; the p-values are shown above the corresponding compared sets of data: bold typeface indicates statistically significant (p<0.05) differences. D) MoSeq-generated syllable usage in female mice during the Blank portion of the experiment, with syllables most enriched in cKO mice to the left, and in WT to the right. E) Syllable usage in female mice during the TMT portion of the experiment, with syllables most enriched in cKO mice to the left, and in WT to the right. Data points in D and E represent the average ± 95% confidence interval of the proportion (in %) of test time spent using the corresponding syllable. Significantly different syllable usage (indicated by asterisks) was determined using a Kruskal-Wallis test, post-hoc Dunn’s two-sided test with permutation, and multiple comparisons correction using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure with a false discovery rate of 0.05.