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  • Review Article
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Neurobiology of rodent self-grooming and its value for translational neuroscience

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 17, pages 45–59 (2016)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 25 January 2016

This article has been updated

Key Points

  • Self-grooming is an evolutionarily conserved complex innate behaviour that has a role in hygiene maintenance and other physiological functions. Self-grooming is the most frequently occurring awake behaviour in laboratory rodents.

  • Self-grooming is an important phenotype to study in translational neuroscience, as it may allow the modelling of human diseases that have symptoms similar to, and/or share pathogenetic mechanisms with, aberrant grooming in rodents.

  • Analysing animal self-grooming also has a broader value in the study of neurobiology underlying complex repetitive behaviours, which may be disrupted in certain neurological diseases.

  • In this Review, we discuss the neurobiology of grooming, including its underlying circuitry, genetic mechanisms and pharmacological modulation.

  • We also highlight studies of rodent self-grooming behaviour in models of neuropsychiatric disorders that suggest that it is valuable asset for clinical and translational neuroscience research, including the identification of neural circuits that control complex patterned behaviours.

  • These findings suggest that the study of rodent self-grooming has multiple implications for translational neuroscience, which may extend beyond understanding the self-grooming behaviour itself.

Abstract

Self-grooming is a complex innate behaviour with an evolutionarily conserved sequencing pattern and is one of the most frequently performed behavioural activities in rodents. In this Review, we discuss the neurobiology of rodent self-grooming, and we highlight studies of rodent models of neuropsychiatric disorders — including models of autism spectrum disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder — that have assessed self-grooming phenotypes. We suggest that rodent self-grooming may be a useful measure of repetitive behaviour in such models, and therefore of value to translational psychiatry. Assessment of rodent self-grooming may also be useful for understanding the neural circuits that are involved in complex sequential patterns of action.

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Figure 1: Rodent self-grooming behaviour.
Figure 2: Brain regions involved in the regulation of rodent self-grooming.
Figure 3: Expected self-grooming behaviour in rodent models of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.

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  • 04 January 2015

    This article has been corrected on both HTML and PDF versions.

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Acknowledgements

This Review is a tribute to John C. Fentress (1939–2015), a brilliant scientist, good friend and a true pioneer of ethology and neurobiology research. This study is supported by the ZENEREI Research Center (A.V.K., A.M.S.), Guangdong Ocean University (A.V.K., C.S.), St. Petersburg State University grant 1.38.201.2014 (A.V.K.), as well as by the US National Institutes of Health grants NS025529, HD028341, MH060379 (A.M.G.) and MH63649, DA015188 (K.B.). A.V.K. research is supported by the Government of Russian Federation (Act 211, contract 02.A03.21.0006 with Ural Federal University). The authors thank M. Nguyen, E. J. Kyzar and Y. Kubota for their assistance with this manuscript. They wish to acknowledge helpful suggestions from D. J. Anderson (California Institute of Technology, USA) regarding the roles of amygdala-related circuitry in grooming behaviour. The authors also thank manufacturers of neurophenotyping tools for providing information used in Supplementary information S5 (figure).

Author information

Author notes

  1. John C. Fentress: Deceased

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute of Marine Drugs and Nutrition, Key Laboratory of Aquatic Product Processing and Safety, College of Food Science and Technology, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang, 524088, China

    Allan V. Kalueff & Cai Song

  2. Neuroscience Research Laboratory, ZENEREI Research Center, Slidell, 70458, Louisiana, USA

    Allan V. Kalueff & Adam Michael Stewart

  3. Institute of Translational Biomedicine, St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, 199034, Russia

    Allan V. Kalueff

  4. Institutes of Chemical Technologies and Natural Sciences, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, 620002, Russia

    Allan V. Kalueff

  5. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford St, Life Sciences Centre, Halifax, B3H4R2, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Cai Song & John C. Fentress

  6. Graduate Institute of Neural Cognitive Science, China Medical University, Taichung, 000001, Taiwan

    Cai Song

  7. Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 525E University Str, Ann Arbor, 48109, Michigan, USA

    Kent C. Berridge

  8. McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Ann M. Graybiel

Authors
  1. Allan V. Kalueff
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  2. Adam Michael Stewart
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  4. Kent C. Berridge
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  5. Ann M. Graybiel
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  6. John C. Fentress
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Allan V. Kalueff.

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Related links

PowerPoint slides

Supplementary information

Supplementary information S1 (movie)

Supplementary information S1 (movie) is reproduced with permission from Professor Kent Berridge. (WMV 5857 kb)

Supplementary information S2 (movie)

Supplementary information S2 (movie) is reproduced with permission from Professor Allan Kalueff. (MPG 7423 kb)

Supplementary information S3 (table)

The effects of selected hypothalamic and pituitary hormones on self-grooming behavior in rodents (PDF 271 kb)

Supplementary information S4 (table)

Genetically modified mouse strains with aberrant grooming behaviors* (PDF 349 kb)

Supplementary information S5 (figure)

Shown here are examples of rodent self-grooming and its patterning in context of automated behavioral analyses (images — courtesy of Metris BV (Netherlands) and CleverSys, Inc., USA; also see Supplementary information S6 (table) online) (PDF 517 kb)

Supplementary information S6 (table)

Summary of currently available software-based solutions for rodent grooming behavioral analyses (information as provided by developers in Summer 2015) (PDF 187 kb)

Glossary

Cephalocaudal progression

A general direction (or rule) of rodent self-grooming behaviour that begins at the nose, then continues to the face and head, the body, the tail and the genitals.

Grooming microstructure

The complex sequential organization (patterning) of self-grooming movements.

Fixed-action patterns

Instinctive species-specific behavioural sequences that, once begun, run to their completion.

Basal ganglia

A group of subcortical nuclei involved in motor control, motivation and organizing movements into behavioural sequences.

Ventral tegmental area

A midbrain region (implicated in reward, anxiety and aversion) that contains the dopaminergic cell bodies of the mesocorticolimbic system.

Research domain criteria

(RDoC). A strategy in translational mental health research that aims to explore the basic mechanisms of brain deficits to understand symptom sets that are observed across multiple disorders.

Behavioural perseveration

The repetition of a specific behaviour that becomes inappropriate in the absence of behaviour-evoking stimuli.

Stereotypies

Repetitive behaviours involving an abnormal or excessive repetition of a behavioural action in the same way over time.

Tics

Sudden, repetitive, involuntary movements or vocalizations with varying intensity and frequency.

Displacement

Behaviour that is seemingly irrelevant to the context, which is displayed during a conflict of motivations or when the animal is unable to perform an activity for which it is motivated.

Krabbe disease

(Also known as globoid cell leukodystrophy). A rare, fatal neurodegenerative disorder that is due to genetic defect causing aberrant brain myelination.

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Kalueff, A., Stewart, A., Song, C. et al. Neurobiology of rodent self-grooming and its value for translational neuroscience. Nat Rev Neurosci 17, 45–59 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2015.8

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