An Automated Home-Cage System to Assess Learning and Performance of a Skilled Motor Task in a Mouse Model of Huntington’s Disease

Woodard, Cameron L.; Bolaños, Federico; Boyd, James D.; Silasi, Gergely; Murphy, Timothy H.; Raymond, Lynn A.

doi:10.1523/eneuro.0141-17.2017

Cited by 33 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To dispense drops from the double-spout, we use two complementary approaches. Regular water drops are dispensed from a reservoir using a gravity-fed valve-based system, as described previously 22 , 29 . This method of water delivery is reliable; however, the drops vary in size due to changes in the level of the water reservoir or changes in resistance.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To enable identification of group-housed mice, animals were implanted with glass RFID capsules (Sparkfun SEN-09416) prior to treatment as described in Woodard et al (2017) 22 . Briefly, animals were anesthetized with isoflurane and given buprenorphine via subcutaneous injection (0.05 mg/kg) for analgesia.…”

Section: Rfid Capsule Implantationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These systems provide the combined benefits of increasing the throughput of experiments and volume of data that can be collected, while also decreasing experimenter interaction and animal stress. Open-source tools that enable the home-cage monitoring of feeding and drinking 16 , 17 , bodyweight 18 , 19 , activity levels 20 , 21 , and more complex learning tasks 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 have all been published in recent years. In one notable study, the authors developed a proprietary home-cage methodology to automatically dose group-housed mice with the synthetic nucleoside BrdU over several days 27 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

PiDose: an open-source system for accurate and automated oral drug administration to group-housed mice

Woodard

Nasrallah

Samiei

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drug treatment studies in laboratory mice typically employ manual administration methods such as injection or gavage, which can be time-consuming to perform over long periods and cause substantial stress in animals. These stress responses may mask or enhance treatment effects, increasing the risk of false positive or negative results and decreasing reliability. to address the lack of an automated method for drug treatment in group-housed mice, we have developed PiDose, a home-cage attached device that weighs individual animals and administers a daily dosage of drug solution based on each animal's bodyweight through their drinking water. Group housed mice are identified through the use of RFID tagging and receive both regular water and drug solution drops by licking at a spout within the PiDose module. This system allows animals to be treated over long periods (weeks to months) in a fully automated fashion, with high accuracy and minimal experimenter interaction. PiDose is low-cost and fully open-source and should prove useful for researchers in both translational and basic research. Biological research often involves treating experimental rodents with compounds over extended periods. A variety of routes of administration are used in these studies, with the goal to optimize delivery of the agent while reducing the potential for injury and procedure-associated stress. Parenteral administration via subcutaneous or intraperitoneal injection is often used due to the high bioavailability of injected drugs; however, repeated restraint and injection causes stress and puts the animal at risk of physical complications 1,2,3. These stress responses are particularly undesirable in behavioural studies, as chronic stress affects a variety of behaviours and may mask treatment affects and increase the risk of Type I/II errors 4,5. An alternative to injection is oral administration, which is often useful in a pre-clinical context as oral drug treatment is the most common and convenient route of administration in humans. Unfortunately, oral gavage presents the same problems as injection regarding treatment stress and the potential for injury 1,6. To avoid this, several studies have provided methods for the voluntary feeding of drugs to animals in a palatable form (e.g. sucrose water, peanut butter) 7,8,9,10. This avoids some of the side effects associated with injection and gavage, but is time-consuming for chronic experiments and involves extensive experimenter interaction, which in itself may be enough to increase animal stress 11. To circumvent the need for manual administration, other studies have mixed the drug with the animal's drinking water 12,13,14,15. However, this method typically estimates drug dosage based on the average bodyweight and water consumption for all mice in a cage. This relies on the assumption that mice are drinking an amount of water that is directly proportional to their bodyweight, for which there is not clear support. To avoid this caveat, animals can be single-housed, or double-housed with a divider....

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rfid Capsule Implantationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

PiDose: an open-source system for accurate and automated oral drug administration to group-housed mice

Woodard

Nasrallah

Samiei

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The scoring of hand shape and grasp movement has also been used to evaluate the extent of compensatory changes in movement strategy following injuries (26,29,30). More recently, feedback loop approaches have been developed to investigate motor adaptation and motor strength using lever pulling in static (31,32) and dynamic conditions (33), which allows for a closer investigation of the neural correlates in motor planning and execution during power grasp experiments. Here, our focus is on precision grasp-related assays such as the skilled reach task or reach-and-grasp assay to draw a correspondence with similar assays described in human literature.…”

Section: Reach-to-grasp Assessments In Rodentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurostimulation and Reach-to-Grasp Function Recovery Following Acquired Brain Injury: Insight From Pre-clinical Rodent Models and Human Applications

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Reach-to-grasp is an evolutionarily conserved motor function that is adversely impacted following stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) methods, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation, are promising tools that could enhance functional recovery of reach-to-grasp post-brain injury. Though the rodent literature provides a causal understanding of post-injury recovery mechanisms, it has had a limited impact on NIBS protocols in human research. The high degree of homology in reach-to-grasp circuitry between humans and rodents further implies that the application of NIBS to brain injury could be better informed by findings from pre-clinical rodent models and neurorehabilitation research. Here, we provide an overview of the advantages and limitations of using rodent models to advance our current understanding of human reach-to-grasp function, cortical circuitry, and reorganization. We propose that a cross-species comparison of reach-to-grasp recovery could provide a mechanistic framework for clinically efficacious NIBS treatments that could elicit better functional outcomes for patients.

show abstract

“…Such supervised imaging following home cage training of individual animals will permit high-resolution microscopy in the context of extended automated training ( Aoki et al, 2017 ). Recently, our lab and others have begun to automate the acquisition of mesoscale functional brain imaging ( Murphy et al, 2016 ) and motor actions data using compact and cost-effective Linux-based Raspberry Pi or other single board computers ( Ardesch et al, 2017 ; Silasi et al, 2018 ; Woodard et al, 2017 ). This work extends previous automated analysis of animal behaviors within home cages ( Bollu et al, 2019 ; Robinson et al, 2013 ; Robinson and Riedel, 2014 ; Robinson et al, 2018 ) to the more complex brain circuit level analysis during behavioral tasks in combination with mesoscale imaging.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated task training and longitudinal monitoring of mouse mesoscale cortical circuits using home cages

Murphy¹,

Michelson

Boyd

et al. 2020

eLife

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We report improved automated open-source methodology for head-fixed mesoscale cortical imaging and/or behavioral training of home cage mice using Raspberry Pi-based hardware. Staged partial and probabilistic restraint allows mice to adjust to self-initiated headfixation over 3 weeks’ time with ~50% participation rate. We support a cue-based behavioral licking task monitored by a capacitive touch-sensor water spout. While automatically head-fixed, we acquire spontaneous, movement-triggered, or licking task-evoked GCaMP6 cortical signals. An analysis pipeline marked both behavioral events, as well as analyzed brain fluorescence signals as they relate to spontaneous and/or task-evoked behavioral activity. Mice were trained to suppress licking and wait for cues that marked the delivery of water. Correct rewarded go-trials were associated with widespread activation of midline and lateral barrel cortex areas following a vibration cue and delayed frontal and lateral motor cortex activation. Cortical GCaMP signals predicted trial success and correlated strongly with trial-outcome dependent body movements.

show abstract

An Automated Home-Cage System to Assess Learning and Performance of a Skilled Motor Task in a Mouse Model of Huntington’s Disease

Abstract: Visual Abstract

Cited by 33 publications

References 41 publications

PiDose: an open-source system for accurate and automated oral drug administration to group-housed mice

PiDose: an open-source system for accurate and automated oral drug administration to group-housed mice

Neurostimulation and Reach-to-Grasp Function Recovery Following Acquired Brain Injury: Insight From Pre-clinical Rodent Models and Human Applications

Automated task training and longitudinal monitoring of mouse mesoscale cortical circuits using home cages

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About