The role of nutritional factors in behavioural development in laboratory mice

This paper addresses the importance of considering nutritional factors as a source of variability in studies of behavioural development in mice. Work in our laboratory, using a standardised developmental scale that allows quantitative comparisons among different studies, indicates that nutritional factors do have the propensity to influence behavioural development to a degree similar to that seen with some genotypic manipulations. These nutritional factors encompass both undernutrition, which entails an overall reduction in nutrient and caloric intake, and malnutrition, which refers to a dietary imbalance, i.e. a deficiency (or excess) of specific macro- or micronutrients. As an example of malnutrition, we describe investigations in mice that address the role of the essential fatty acids in brain and behavioural development. These show that manipulations of dietary lipid composition that are in the same range that one would find among commercial laboratory diets influence not only behavioural development, but also performance on other behavioural tasks. This suggests that detailed dietary information may be useful in the attempt to characterise the sources of variation in the behavioural phenotypes of mice.