Are cerebral and behavioural lateralization related to anxiety-like traits in the animal model zebrafish (Danio rerio)?

ABSTRACT

Brain lateralization refers to hemispheric asymmetries in functions and/or neuroanatomical structures. Functional specialization in non-human animals has been mainly inferred through observation of lateralized motor responses and sensory perception. Only in a few cases has the influence of brain asymmetries on behaviour been described. Zebrafish has rapidly become a valuable model to investigate this issue as it displays epithalamic asymmetries that have been correlated to some lateralized behaviours. Here we investigated the relation between neuroanatomical or behavioural lateralization and anxiety using a light-dark preference test in adult zebrafish. In Experiment 1, we observed how scototaxis response varied as a function of behavioural lateralization measured in the detour task as turning preference in front of a dummy predator. In Experiment 2, foxD3:GFP transgenic adult zebrafish with left or right parapineal position, were tested in the same light-dark test as fish in Experiment 1. No correlation was found between the behaviour observed in the detour test and in the scototaxis test nor between the left- and right-parapineal fish and the scototaxis response. The consistency of results obtained in both experiments indicates that neither behavioural nor neuroanatomical asymmetries are related to anxiety-related behaviours measured in the light-dark test.

KEYWORDS:

• Zebrafish
• behavioural lateralization
• neuroanatomical asymmetry
• anxiety
• scototaxis

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Alessandra Pecunioso and Saeedeh Hosseinian for their help testing the subjects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [MEMP], upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action, 750200) to M.E. Miletto Petrazzini, by “Stars@unipd” grant (MetaZeb) from the University of Padova to M.E. Miletto Petrazzini and by Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2016-163) to C. Brennan. The present work was carried out within the scope of the research programme “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza” (art.1, commi 314–337 legge 232/2016), which was supported by a grant from MIUR (“Ministero dell'istruzione, dell'università e della ricerca”) to the Department of General Psychology, University of Padova.