Maybe these shrimp or sea monkeys will make an interesting alternative model to determine antidepressant effects. It certainly has to be cheaper than using mice! Are there other advantages?
The standard measures in mice are related to despair behaviour which include tail-suspension and forced-swimming time. Both of these look at how long it takes for the animal to give up, sit and hang still or stick out their legs and float. Drugs or gene manipulations with antidepressant actions increase the time of these escape related movements. Other more sophisticated studies have looked at despair in relation to chronic-social defeat, where a little boy-mouse is exposed to a larger more aggressive man-mouse. This pattern of early life stress leads to the animal developing a phenotype similar to human depression. They stop enjoying their sweet treat biscuits (often froot-loops), groom less frequently and are less interested in hanging with other mice or use their cage toys. These paradigms are challenging to set up and require continuous dosing for ~2weeks.In that we understand so little about the mechanisms of action of antidepressants is it about time we go back to basic models? These shrimp move towards the light. Other folk have shown the microscopic worm C. elegans changes the way it moves his snout. What more can we learn from these simple, highly-tuned organisms, about drugs which are used to treat people experiencing their darkest times?
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