Planning genomic study in an animal model of depression: a preliminary report.

Abstract

Interaction of several genes is responsible for psychiatric diseases such as depression. Despite the numerous microarray studies in this field, findings are controversial and hard to conclude.Male Wistar rats were randomly selected to receive Chronic Mild Stress model for 4 weeks. Different aspects of depression were measured by forced swimming test, open field trial and sucrose preference tests in the experience group and controls.Sucrose was preferred by 40% of CMS group and 80% of controls (p=0.025). Twenty percent of CMS group and 80% of controls were "active" (p=0.001). Last escape was at minute 238 for CMS group and minute 245 for controls and controls had more escape efforts.This paper is a preliminary report of a genomic study on animal model of depression which tries to achieve reliable results by a joint of clinical view with recent techniques. Predicted challenges in this procedure and the solutions as well as the limitations may be helpful for future researches.