Figure 1.

Sickle mice display significant cognitive and neurobehavioral deficits under stress compared to control mice. A)-B) illustrate the results for the open field test, depicting distance traveled through the open field arena and time spent in the middle of the arena. Statistical comparisons were conducted using a two-way ANOVA with Tuckey’s multiple comparisons test. C) depicts preference for the novel object in the NOR test. One-way ANOVA with uncorrected Fisher’s LSD multiple comparisons was conducted to compare object preference between groups. D)-F) illustrate results for the fear conditioning studies (a measure of associative memory). D) represents the training phase, where mice acquired a fear response to an 85 dB tone that was paired with a shock through classical conditioning. E) and F) test the strength of the animals’ conditioned fear response by observing freezing behavior (indicative of fear) after being placed the same environment where the shock had been administered during the learning phase or after hearing the 85dB tone that was associated with the shock, respectively. Freezing behavior was compared between groups using Fisher’s LSD for the training phase and a two-way ANOVA with Holm-Sidak’s adjustment for multiple comparisons for the contextual and cued fear assessments. *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001. Data are presented as mean ± SD.