Researchers studying social relationships among female rats

Strong social relationships among female rats are linked to reducing anxiety response and more exploratory behaviour, according to research from The Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge.

The research is a collaborative effort between Jamshid Faraji, a local research associate in Gerlinde Met’z lab, and scientists from Golestan University of MedicalSciences and Avicenna Institute of Neuroscience in Iran. The research showed the benefits of socialized female rats had a direct transmission to their female offspring.

The results of the study were recently published in Scientific Reports - Nature, in an article titled “Intergenerational Sex-Specific Transmission of Maternal Social Experience.”

The findings are particularly important to Farjari as it could relate to humans as well. “We, as humans, are becoming increasingly socially isolated and many of us are deprived of face-toface visual and interactional inputs,” said Faraji in a press release.

“From a scientific perspective, we needed to find the neurohormonal correlates of social life and how that could impact our lives and, particularly, women’s lives.”

The rat model studied four groups of rats — both male and female — that lived in standard and social housing conditions.

Two to three rats living together were considered standard whereas a dozen or so living in a larger space was considered social.

After three months of studies, researchers noticed those living in the social condition showed unique changes to the brain structure and function of the rats, but greater changes were displayed among the females.

The study showed social females were developing changes in the cortexes and density in neuronal populations.

Researchers were curious to see if the changes would affect the brain and behaviour of their offspring and studies were done on the second generation of rats which were all raised in stand conditions.

There were equal numbers of offspring from mothers who had lived in social and standard living conditions.

“There’s a very clear track of female lineage or mother-to-daughter pathway,” Faraji added. “Although the female offspring were not exposed to social life, they were getting all those characteristics from their social mothers.”

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