Early life stress leads to atypical leftward turning in rats!

Elevated Plus Maze3In a recently published study in Behavioural Brain Research, Anna and Nadja, together with Sebastian and Hiroshi from the Department Biopsychology at the Ruhr-University Bochum, investigated the effects of early life stress on the turning behavior of rats using DeepLabCut. Interestingly, prolonged maternal separation leads to atypical leftward asymmetry in turning behavior and more left than right turns in the elevated plus maze. Analyzing turning behavior after stress exposure might even be a good way to investigate atypical asymmetries in psychiatric models.

Check out their study Asymmetry of turning behavior in rats is modulated by early life stress here.