More running causes more ocular dominance plasticity in mouse primary visual cortex: new gated running wheel setup allows to quantify individual running behaviour of group-housed mice.

Environmental enrichment boosts neuronal plasticity of standard-cage raised (SC) mice. Since it becomes increasingly more important to track individual mouse behaviours and its influence on brain plasticity, we designed a gated running wheel (gRW) setup allowing to correlate wheel running with neuronal plasticity, using the established paradigm of ocular dominance (OD)-plasticity after monocular deprivation (MD). After SC-rearing until adulthood (>P110), group-housed mice were transferred to gRW cages, that provided an additional running wheel compartment for tracking individual wheel activity via implanted RFID chips. Notably, individual running parameters varied enormously: mice ran from close to 0 to [~]20 km across the 7 days of gRW experience, with on average running 0-3.96 km in 0-3.85 h/d and running bouts lasting from View larger version (21K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@e1045dorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@e5af90org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1693a46org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@170ec3d_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG