Abstract
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) remains an untreatable neurodegenerative disease without a cure or effective treatment, mainly due to elusive underlying mechanisms. ALS is primarily characterized by motor neuron dysfunction in the brain and spinal cord. However, it also exhibits non-motor symptoms such as executive, behavioral, and language dysfunction, making it challenging to establish informative disease models for relevant preclinic and clinical research. The discovery of ALS-causing genes has paved the way for the development of various animal models. Among these models, rodents have emerged as particularly valuable, demonstrating unique ALS-related behavioral defects in multiple behavioral tests. These models enable further understanding of disease mechanisms and provide sensitive and precise functional assessments for drug development. Given the intricate nature of ALS pathology, it is crucial and challenging to select appropriate behavioral tests as functional exploratory readouts, mainly due to the diverse array of ALS rodent models exhibiting distinct behavioral paradigms. Therefore, this report endeavors to present an overview of various behavioral assessments, encompassing motion ability tests, cognitive evaluations, sensory analyses, and other paradigms described in rodent models of ALS. Our goal is to summarize and compare the behavioral alterations observed in diverse rodent models of ALS with distinct gene mutations, thus providing comprehensive references and guidance for advancing pathogenic and therapeutic research in ALS.