Figure 1.
Schema representing behavioral and histology pipeline. (A) (Left) Alloparental behavioral model in mice. Pregnant CBA/CaJ female (grey mouse) is cohoused with adult female naïve WT and naïve Het littermate controls, which changes their status to surrogates, 3-5 days before birth of pups. Once pups are born, pup retrieval assay is performed with the surrogates from day 0 (D0) to 5 (D5). (Center) After behavioral experiments on D5, surrogate mice and age-matched naïve counterparts are perfused, their brains extracted, and sectioned as a single cohort. (Right) Standard immunostaining and imaging with epifluorescent slide scanner are performed, to image and analyze PNNs, as elaborated in Methods. (B) Schema of mouse brain sections cut in sagittal orientation, depicting all medial (2.28 mm, corresponding to map number 120) to lateral (3.72 mm, corresponding to map number 132) regions of SS1 analyzed for this study. Coordinate maps are based on Paxinos and Franklin’s mouse brain atlas, 4th edition.