Selective increases in inter-individual variability in response to environmental enrichment in female mice

One manifestation of individualization is a progressively differential response of individuals to the non-shared components of the same environment. Individualization has practical implications in the clinical setting, where subtle differences between patients are often decisive for the success of an intervention, yet there has been no suitable animal model to study its underlying biological mechanisms. Here we show that enriched environment (ENR) can serve as a model of brain individualization. We kept 40 isogenic female C57BL/6JRj mice for 3 months in ENR and compared these mice to an equally sized group of standard-housed control animals, looking at the effects on a wide range of phenotypes in terms of both means and variances. Although ENR influenced multiple parameters and restructured correlation patterns between them, it only increased differences among individuals in traits related to brain and behavior (adult hippocampal neurogenesis, motor cortex thickness, open field and obje...

个体化（individualization）的典型表现之一，是个体对同一环境中的非共享组分逐渐产生差异化反应。个体化在临床场景中具有重要实践价值：患者间的细微差异往往决定了干预措施的成败，但目前尚无合适的动物模型可用于探究其潜在生物学机制。本研究证实，丰富环境（enriched environment, ENR）可作为脑个体化的研究模型。我们将40只同基因雌性C57BL/6JRj小鼠置于丰富环境中饲养3个月，并将其与数量匹配的标准饲养对照动物组进行比较，从均值与方差两个层面分析其对多种表型（phenotypes）的影响。尽管丰富环境影响了多项参数并重构了参数间的相关模式，但仅增大了个体在脑与行为相关性状中的差异，包括成年海马神经发生、运动皮层厚度、旷场实验以及……