Female C57BL/6J Mice Show Alcohol-Seeking Behaviour after Withdrawal from Prolonged Alcohol Consumption in the Social Environment

AIMS: Recently we developed a model to study alcohol-seeking behaviour after withdrawal in a social context in female mice. The model raised several questions that we were eager to address to improve methodology. METHODS: In our model, female mice were group-housed in automated cages with three conditioned (CS+) corners and water in both sides of one separate non-conditioned corner. Water was available with opened doors at all the time of training. We established conditioning by pairing alcohol drinking with light cues. Here, we introduced prolonged access to increasing concentrations of alcohol instead of intermittent access. To study motivation to drink alcohol, we carried out the extinction tests on withdrawal days 1 (WD1) and 10 (WD10). During tests, the light cues were present in conditioned corners, but there was no liquid in the bottles. RESULTS: We found that the number of visits and nosepokes in the CS+ corner in the alcohol group was much higher than in the water group. Also, during training, the consumption of alcohol was increasing. In the extinction tests, we found that the number of nosepokes in the CS+ corner increased in the alcohol group on both WD1 and WD10. CONCLUSIONS: Our study supports that alcohol-seeking behaviour after withdrawal can be modelled and studied in group-housed animals and environments without social isolation.