Depression Animal Models

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Ace Therapeutics, as a drug discovery and development partner, has a mature animal model research and development platform. We are committed to providing customized services for depression animal models for psychiatric research and helping researchers successfully achieve research goals.

Introduction of Depression Animal Models

Depression is the most common psychiatric disorder among emotional disorders, affecting approximately 10% of the adult population. The etiology and pathogenesis of depression are still poorly understood. For most human diseases, animal models are not only helpful to avoid obstacles to the study of ethical issues related to depression, but also to obtain enough samples to help us understand the pathogenesis of depression. More importantly, they can promote people to find new treatments.

Fig. 1 The future of rodent models in depression research. (Gururajan A, et al., 2019)

Animal Modeling Services for Depression

Ace Therapeutics has developed a variety of animal models based on the etiology of depression, acute or chronic stress exposure, gene environment interaction, exogenous glucocorticoid administration and gene manipulation. These models have been verified and cover several aspects of depression like and cognitive behavior that are very similar to human depression. These animal models of depression can be used not only to examine the neural circuits in the controlled environment, but also to study the molecular and cellular pathways that may be crucial to the pathogenesis of depression.

Information on animal models of depression we provide:

Table 1 Environmentally induced animal models of depression.

Depression Models	Emulated Depression Characteristics	Applications
Early-life stress
Prenatal stress	Induce depression and anxiety-like phenotype: prolonged immobility in forced swim test (FST) and tail suspension test (TST), anhedonia-reduced preference to sucrose solution. and anxiety in Elevated Plus Maze (EPM)	Useful in the research and elucidation of the epigenetic mechanisms underlying the consequences of gestational stress or early-life stress to later depression and anxiety.
Maternal separation	Induce learning and memory deficits, depressive- and anxious like behavior in open field and EPM.	Suitable for studying the interaction between genes and environment in a newborn animal.
Post-weaning social isolation stress	Induce depressive- and anxious-like behavior in open field and EPM.	Useful to study the effects of social isolation stressors on anxiety, depression and substance use disorders (SUDs) in adolescence
Adulthood stress
Social isolation	Induces both anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in FST, TST EPM, and sucrose preference test	Useful to study the predictive effectiveness of antidepressant treatment
Learned helplessness	Induces anxiety- and depression-like behaviors with good similarity to the symptoms of depression with cognitive and neuroendocrine impairments.	Useful to investigate the effect of unpredictable and uncontrollable stress.
Chronic mild stress (CMS)	Induces both anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in FST, EPM, and sucrose preference tests.	Useful to investigate the effect of mild unpredictable stress.
Repeated restraint stress (CRS)	Induces depressive-like phenotype in social interaction, anhedonia, increased anxiety-like behavior, and impaired spatial learning.	Useful to explore the effect of chronic psycho-emotional stress
Chronic social defeat stress	Induces long-term depressive-like phenotype expressed as anhedonia and social avoidance.	Useful to investigate the effect of repeated, high-pressure social stress on depression.
Social instability stress (SIS)	Induce both anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in OF, EPM, sucrose preference and social interaction tests	Useful to investigate the effect of repeated social stress on depression.

Table 2 Animal model of depression with brain injury.

Depression Models	Emulated Depression Characteristics	Applications
Olfactory bulbectomy (OBX)	Induces both anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in OF, EPM, sucrose preference, social interaction tests and memory dysfunction	Useful in investigation of the chronic psychomotor agitated depression.

Table 3 Pharmacological animal models of depression.

Depression Models	Emulated Depression Characteristics	Applications
Reserpine induced depression model	Induces depression-like behaviors in OF, FST, TST and sucrose preference tests	Useful to study the predictive effectiveness of antidepressant treatment
Corticosterone Model of Depression	Induces both anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in OF, EPM, sucrose preference, cognitive impairments in Morris water maze and T-maze tests	Useful to study the predictive effectiveness of antidepressant treatment

Table 4 Genetic animal models of depression.

Depression Models	Emulated Depression Characteristics	Applications
Wistar Kyoto (WKY) model	Demonstrates depression-like behaviors in FST, OF, sucrose preference test.	Useful to study HPA functions of anomalies.
Genetically-selected Flinders Sensitive Line (FSL) rat model	Demonstrates depression-like behaviors in FST.	Useful in studies of human depression with psychomotor retardation and to evaluate efficacy and safety of antidepressant agents in pregnant dams and their offspring during early life and later at adulthood.
Model of selective breeding for depressive-like and manic-like behavior in mice	Demonstrates both anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in OF, EPM, sucrose preference and social interactions tests, cognitive impairments in 8-arm maze and object recognition tests.	Useful to study social hierarchy effect on depression and in investigations of stress resilience and stress susceptibility.
Selective breeding model of low activity in a swim test: high-active (SwHi) and low-active (SwLo) rats	Demonstrates both anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in FST, OF and EPM tests.	Useful to study the changes of dopaminergic and glutamate pathway.
The Fawn-Hooded (FH/Wjd) rat	Demonstrates depressive-like phenotype with concomitant high voluntary ethanol intake	Useful to study the changes of 5-hydroxytryptamine energy, GABAenergy and HPA pathway.

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Ace Therapeutics provides customized services for animal models of depression to help you develop new therapies for depression. Please tell us your project requirements, we will provide you with a comprehensive service from solution to report. If you have any questions, please feel free to make an inquiry.

References

Becker M, et al. Animal Models of Depression: What Can They Teach Us about the Human Disease?. Diagnostics (Basel). 2021, 11(1):123.
Wang Q, et al. The recent progress in animal models of depression. Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 2017, 77:99-109.
Planchez B, et al. Animal models of major depression: drawbacks and challenges. J Neural Transm (Vienna). 2019, 126(11):1383-1408.
Gururajan A, et al. The future of rodent models in depression research. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2019, 20(11):686-701.

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