Study on Learning and Memory of Mutant Mice

Recent progress in study on learning and memory of mutant mice was summarized in this paper.In our work the conditioned avoidance training of Fyn-deficient mice was carried out in a one way avoidance box.In order to avoid eliciting the hyperreactivity to the aversive stimulus,the minimal intensity of electric shock for driving the mouse to run to the safe compartment.The homozygous mutant mice needed much more numbers of trials (79.13±30.1) for reaching the learning criterion than heterozygous (27.38±7.86) and wild-type (34.87±10.9) mice did.These results showed that Fyn-deficiency impairs associative learning.It was supposed that to select the proper behavioral models seems very important for studying on learning and memory of mutant mice.The behavioral model of conditioned avoidance task may be useful for behavioral study of mutant mice.Moreover,as the gene expression may be different in defferent stages of development,to study the behavioral changes of transgenic mice in different stage of development will provide us more information about the functions of genes.The preliminary results of our recent study on behavior of GABA-transported gene (GAT1) transgenic mice showed that in adult mice GAT1 was expressed much more than that in young animals.