Behavior and the antibody response as differential traits in three murine inbred strains (DBA/2, BALB/c, C57BL/6)

The goal of this research was to find out whether an antibody response is consistently associated with any particular behavior across three murine strains (C57BL/6, BALB/c, and DBA/2). The mice took the following behavioral tests: two open fields, a hole board, and a light-darkness test; afterward, they were immunized with rat erythrocytes, and serum levels of IgM and IgG antibodies were measured 5 and 15 days postimmunization. Nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests were used to reveal the set of variables that differentiated the three strains or pairs of the strains. The set of (behavioral and immune) variables that distinguished any two strains or all three strains depended on the particular combination of strains compared.