While great strides have been made in the development of genetic and neurobiological tools with which to model psychiatric disease, elucidation of neural and molecular mechanisms thought to underlie behavioral phenotypes has been hindered by an inadequate analysis of behavior.
Individual differences in metabolism and behavioral phenotype have been posited to be correlated (Careau et al. 2008; Biro and Stamps 2010; Houston 2010), and metabolism has been associated with behavioral phenotype in adults (Mus domesticus, Rezende et al. 2009; Peromyscus maniculatus, Careau et al. 2011; Canis familiaris, Careau et al. 2010; Microtus oeconomus, Lantová et al. 2011).
Although the BXD RI lines are becoming more widely used, many common behavioral phenotypes have not been studied to date, have been measured in only a few lines or have only been studied in one sex.
Age-related polyethism, a derived form of division of labor in ants and bees where colony tasks are allocated among distinct behavioral phenotypes, has traditionally been assumed to be a product of convergent evolution.
Although these mouse models display a range of psychiatric disease-related behavioral phenotypes, many have been inconsistent across studies due to differences in behavior tests and experimental design and the specific genetic aberrations.
Furthermore, changes in DNA methylation resulting from prenatal sGC exposure may underlie a number of metabolic, endocrine, and behavioral phenotypes that have been identified after such exposure in F1, F2, and third-generation generation offspring.
The phenotype has been characterised previously [14].
Though targeted gene mapping efforts using microsatellite markers and resequencing of candidate genes have resulted in discoveries for traits with simple hereditary patterns, the study of complex disease and behavioral phenotypes has proven to be very challenging.
This exquisitely sensitive analysis revealed the underlying simplicity of complex locomotion dynamics as well as subtle behavioral phenotypes that had been previously undetectable (Stephens et al., 2010, 2011; Brown et al., 2013).
