Artificial environments in which rodents are tested for their behavioral repertoire are still the gold standard for neuroscience research. However, increased concern for the validity of animal testing and the welfare of the laboratory animals changes when testing of behaviors moves to a setting that is familiar to the animals.
Stefano Gaburro, PhD, will present an innovative noninvasive and scalable technique called Digital Ventilated Cage (DVC). DVS is used to perform longitudinal studies for neurodegenerative disease models through long-term monitoring of mice in a stress-free environment.
Brun Ulfhake, MD, PhD, will show how this technique can be used to study circadian and circannual biorhythmicity of small rodents and approaches to characterize and extract metrics of the spontaneous home-cage way of life for mice. These metrics may translate better to behavioral observations made in humans.