Research Paper Volume 11, Issue 17 pp 6638—6656

Figure 6. Behavioral response to marble burying and nest building tests. (A) The number of marbles buried by each mouse over a 10 min period (Burying index) is plotted to show the dispersion of the results and to highlight the proportion of mutant mice that did not bury even one marble during the test. Horizontal lines indicate median values. (Kruskal-Wallis test; Control: n = 55; Vgat^ΔDlx5-6/+: n = 39; Vgat^ΔDlx5-6: n=31). The lower panel presents representative examples of the MBT arena at the end of the test for the three genotypes. (B) The quality of nests built by control, Vgat^ΔDlx5-6/+ and Vgat^ΔDlx5-6 mice was evaluated each day over a seven days period. The quality of nest building was scored as: completed nest (green), completely torn paper (light grey), partially torn paper (dark grey) or intact paper (purple). The percentage of mice in each category is indicated at 1, 3 and 7 days. The lower panel presents representative examples of the nest-building arena at the end of the first 24 h of test for the three genotypes. At the end of the scoring period all control mice had completed nest building whereas none of the Vgat^ΔDlx5-6 mice had done so (Pearson's chi-squared; Control: n = 15 and Vgat^ΔDlx5-6/+ : n = 12, Vgat^ΔDlx5-6 : n=15; ***: p<0.001; **: p<0.01).