Developing Standardized Behavioral Tests for Knockout and Mutant Mice

Abstract
The ability to produce transgenic, knockout, and mutant mice provides new animal models for the genetic analysis of behavior and its underlying neural mechanisms ( Chen and Tonegawa 1997 ; Wehner et al. 1996 ). Knockout and transgenic mice have been developed as animal models for the study of human diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (Flood and Morley 1998 ; Nalbantoglu et al. 1997 ), Down’s syndrome ( Schuchmann et al. 1998 ; Tremml et al. 1998 ), Huntington’s disease ( Bates et al. 1997 ), schizophrenia ( Mohn et al. 1999 ), and other neurobiologic disorders ( Nelson and Young 1998 ). Transgenic mice can also be used to study the behavioral effects of altering specific neurochemical receptors such as for N-methyl-D-aspartate and α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxasole-propionate ( Sprengel and Single 1999 ), metabotropic glutamate ( Galani et al. 1997 ), serotonin ( Parks et al. 1998 ), or dopamine ( Steiner et al. 1997 ).