Behavioral adaptations after unilateral whisker denervation

The rodent whisker system provides an excellent model to study experience dependent plasticity in neural morphology, circuitry, and behavior. Rodents use bilateral whisker sensation to gather information about their environment. Unilateral whisker denervation disrupts whisker circuitry but its impact on task specific behavior is largely unknown. Adult mice with unilateral whisker denervation display a preference to using the intact whisker set to inspect objects, but do not have altered open field navigation. An object localization task requiring only the intact whisker set did not detect any change in performance, but gap crossing was impaired after unilateral whisker denervation. Finally, chronic whisker denervation led to increased anxiety-like behavior which was rescued by training on the gap cross task. These findings indicate that mice use behavioral strategies to adapt to life with only one set of intact whiskers. •Unilateral loss of whisker function increases reliance on the intact whisker set as a compensatory behavior.•Despite an increased use of the intact whiskers, there was no gain in performance on a unilateral whisker set pole localization task, indicating that the increased use does not translate to increased sensitivity.•Unilateral whisker denervation impairs depth perception in mice and increases delayed anxiety-like behaviors.•Training on a task reduces anxiety-like behaviors, indicating this may be beneficial after unilateral whisker denervation.