Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sex-specific visuo-spatial recognition memory impairments in adolescent CLOCKΔ19 mouse model of bipolar disorder

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Eden Fraatz¹ (efraatz570@g.rwu.edu), Simrat Kaur Dhillon¹, Giana Guerra¹, Samantha Soares¹, Victoria Heimer-McGinn¹; ¹Roger Williams University

Cognitive deficits are a trait symptom of bipolar disorder (BD) and are predictive of disease outcome and quality of life. However, they remain understudied due to difficulties developing animal models that reproduce mood fluctuations in BD. One emerging model, the ClockΔ19 transgenic mouse line, exhibits regular mood cycling between manic and euthymic behavior over 24 hours. Of interest, visuo-spatial recognition and emotion recognition are impaired in BD. In this study, we examined recognition memory using novel object recognition (NOR) and novel object location (NOL) tasks. We compared adolescent male (M) and female (F) homozygous (HOM) ClockΔ19 mice to wildtype (WT) mice with a sample of 9 F-HOM, 6 M-HOM, 8 F-WT, and 9 M-WT. In NOL, ClockΔ19 HOM mice displayed impaired location recognition (M=0.098) compared to WT (M=0.187; p=0.017), with trends suggesting the impairment is sex-specific to females. In NOR, data suggests the HOM group was unaffected in object recognition compared to WT. These investigations are being extended to social cognition and longitudinal measures of recognition memory. Our NOL findings are consistent with other circadian models, including an environmental mouse model (Short Day), and a Bmal1 genetic model, which speaks to the emerging role of circadian rhythms in BD-related cognition. Finally, since these other circadian studies have not included females, and sex differences in recognition remain unclear in BD patients, our results and future studies will help clarify how potential sex differences relate to BD endophenotypes. In the future, this model will be useful for developing sex-specific treatments for cognition.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic