The Barnes maze is a model for testing spatial cognitive memory in animals that exploits the rodent habit of gravitating to dark environments. It is particularly suitable for stress-related memory studies and behavioral phenotype studies in knockout mice.

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Fig. 1 Barnes maze device.

Features of Barnes Maze

• Take advantage of the rodent's natural tendency to avoid light, prefer darkness and explore.
• The experimental apparatus is simple, and the experimental animals do not need to fast and swim.
• Less stressful stimuli for experimental animals, reducing the influence of confounding factors.

Experimental Procedure

• Habituation

Grabbing, stroking the animal, placing the animal through the target hole into the target box for adaptation.

• Acqusition Training

Move the animal to the center of the platform and restrict movement with a transparent cylinder for 5 seconds. Remove the cylinder to start the timing, while giving the animal stimulation. If the animal successfully enters the target box, the animal is allowed to stay in the target box for 30 seconds.

• Probe Trial

Rotate the disc so that the hole position is different from the previous experiment, but the orientation of the target box always remains the same. The experimental procedure of the previous step was repeated 2 times a day.

Fig. 2 Barnes maze experiment date sheet.

Data Analysis

• Latency of the first exploration hole, time to reach the target hole, number of errors per animal (exploring a wrong hole is considered as one error).
• One-way ANOVA was used, and Fisher's LSD post hoc multiple comparison method was used for two-by-two comparisons when there were differences between multiple groups.
• P0.05 was considered a statistically significant difference.

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