Lateral asymmetry of paw usage: phenotypic survey of constitutive and experience-conditioned paw-usage behaviours among common strains of the mouse

Abstract

Left-right direction of paw usage in the mouse is defined by the right-paw entry (RPE) score, which is the number of reaches with the right paw to retrieve food from a small food tube in a total of 50 right- and left-paw reaches. Two qualitatively different paw-usage behaviours can be identified by the difference in the RPE scores from naive mice in left- or right-biased test chambers and their retest, 1 week later, in the opposite-biased test chamber. In mice with constitutive paw usage, the RPE score may respond to the direction of a biased test chamber, but it returns to the value that is expected for naive mice in the opposite-biased test chamber. In mice with experience-conditioned paw usage, the RPE score responds to the direction of a biased test chamber and does not return to its expected value in the opposite-biased test chamber. In this report, we document the alternate paw usage behaviours in an extended phenotypic survey of different strains that will be useful for its genetic analysis. We also validate an alternate biometrical method to identify constitutive and experience-conditioned paw usage that is based on the mean average RPE score from the biased test and opposite-biased retest of individual mice. This alternate biometrical method demonstrated that, in some strains with experience-conditioned paw usage, there may be asymmetry or an interaction between genotype and the direction of the test sequence. In addition, the strain survey demonstrated that the qualitative difference between constitutive and experience-conditioned paw usage is independent of the well-known quantitative difference in the degree of lateralization of preferred-paw usage.Key words: mouse, lateral asymmetry of paw usage, left and right handedness, behavioural genetics, constitutive behaviour, experience-conditioned behaviour.