Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

We are requesting the following functionally related units, which together provide the basis to build and assemble custom--made tools necessary for automation of training processes within the homecage, long--term monitoring of brain activity and animal behaviours, and automated data storage and analysis. The study of animal behaviour is essential in our effort to understand brain function in health and disease. Addressing the neural mechanisms underlying behaviours requires training animals in well- controlled tasks. Currently, this process is done under close supervision of researchers who frequently modify protocols and procedures on an animal by animal basis to improve learning rates and performance. This strategy is a time consuming and labor intensive process and is a major constraint in collecting and managing large volumes of data both in density (higher number of animals, and longer observations of each animal) and in extension within behavioural space (larger variety of tasks and conditions). In addition, it reduces the reproducibility of finding due to unavoidable experimenter and environmental factors induced variability during both animal training and data analysis. To overcome this constraint, we plan to develop a facility to make a custom--made inexpensive computer--controlled system for high--throughput monitoring of brain activity and animals behaviour and data analysis. Our plan consists of the following: (1) Automation of training processes within the home cage and monitoring animal behaviour; (2) Mesoscopic (population activity) functional imaging of brain activity; (3) Automation of behavioural and neural activity data analysis. We anticipate that smart homecage platforms for high-throughput longitudinal monitoring of rodents behaviour and Brain Activity will be useful for a wide range of studies in basic and translational biological science , and in particular it will be useful for studying behavioral phenotypes in genetic models of human disorders, and for relating behavioral abnormalities to their underlying genetic and neural causes.