Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This application is for essential equipment to enable housing and testing of laboratory mice by 14 NSERC-funded neuroscientists at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience (CCBN) at the University of Lethbridge. The CCBN is characterized by shared infrastructure that is used by 26 investigators spanning six different departments. Research programs at the CCBN span a wide range of areas, ranging from perinatal brain development, recovery after injury, to age-related cognitive decline, the study of skilled movements, attention, social behaviour, memory and decision-making. Our research programs critically depend on the use of laboratory mice, such as in transgenic models, in pharmacological studies, and for high-resolution in vivo molecular imaging of neural plasticity. Unfortunately, due to a disease outbreak in 2009 and a lengthy facility decontamination process in 2010 we had lost the mouse housing and test capacity. The majority of our mouse behavioural test equipment was not autoclavable or got damaged in the cleaning process and had to be discarded. Since then our mouse housing space has been renovated and our facility and health procedures are exceeding Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) expectations. We are in excellent standing and well prepared to refurbish our mouse housing and test facility. This request is to replace damaged infrastructure with a modern mouse housing system, including racks, cages and a health monitoring system, and a basic suite of essential behavioural test equipment dedicated to the use in mice. We are requesting funds to purchase critical items to enable the urgent replacement of damaged mouse housing and testing equipment. The lack of this essential equipment severely hampers our NSERC-funded research and training efforts. The requested equipment is central to our NSERC-funded research programs and will support the research and training of over 300 HQP.