These studies build upon our prior work, where we determined that repeated exposure to intermittent PS (30 min dirty rat bedding) significantly increased anxiety-related behavior and plasma CORT levels (Cozzoli et al., 2014; Finn et al., 2018) as well as neuronal activation in the hippocampus and mPFC (Finn and Ryabinin, unpublished) in naïve male and female C57BL/6J mice. The gene discussed is CORT; the disease is Anxiety.