New technologies in cognitive phenotyping

Behavioral Neuroscience Projects

Contacts: Valter Tucci (Team Leader), Barbara Greco (Post-doc), Glenda Lassi (Research fellow).

The field of cognitive phenotyping needs to evolve rapidly in order to bridge the "post-genomic-gap" between genomics and phenomics.

To respond to this necessity, we are developing a new set of behavioural tasks and devices. In particular we are part of a new EU consortium (PhenoScale). The goals of PhenoScale are to automate and speed the high-throughput phenotyping by combining standardised protocols with novel high-throughput automated home cage environments.

The aim is to add economies of scale, enhance automated data capture and analysis, increase throughput and reduce confounding experimental factors. For example, by using our Automated Nose Poking units we have already observed (in baseline experiments with inbred strains) a remarkable reduction of the time of training for each animal. In particular by using our set-up, mice reach a steady state performance within 10-15 days of training.

All these technologies will be used in IIT to study time and space protocols in mice.

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Behavioral Neuroscience Projects