Behavioral testing

[Zahra Laouby]

Hello everyone,

I would like to have your opinions about the behavioral testing, please.  We are using the miniscope (V3.2) and the wire free miniscope on mice model. Unexpectedly, we observed that the mice with the miniscopes (both tethered and wirefree) exhibit a different behavior than the mice without miniscope. We think maybe the handling before the testing to secure the miniscope, may affect negatively the mice behavior. Hence, I’m wondering if anyone has tricks on how to habituate the animals, or if you experienced the same issue if you could share how you overcame it.

Thank you in advance for your precious help.

PS: the behavioral tests we are currently using are : open field, novel object recognition and Y maze

Best regards,

 

Zahra

[Zeeshan Haqqee]

Hi Zahra, 

What type of abnormal behaviour are you observing? Our lab doesn't usually notice any major behavioural issues (assuming surgery, baseplating, and recovery went well without issues). For some animals, the miniscope might be a bit heavy for their heads at first, so we glue a 2g steel hex nut onto a baseplate cover and let them get used to this weight for a couple days (and then keeping this as their "cap" for the remainder of their testing). Make sure also when baseplating to be very conservative with the amount of cement used so as to not occlude the eyes or add anymore weight or shape than necessary. Also try to avoid the skin as much as possible to avoid irritating the skin, which could lead them to excessively scratch and groom the area. 

Hope that helps! 

Zeeshan 

[Federico Sangiuliano]

Hello Zahra. One thing you can try is to habituate the animal with a dummy miniscope with the same weight and center of mass. We have a model for the v4 in this group that can be 3D printed, and doing the same for the v3 is not difficult. In my opinion keeping the same (or roughly) center of mass is as important as the weight. Let me know if this helps

Thank you

Federico

[Zahra Laouby]

Hello Zeeshan,

Thank you very much for your reply and help, the 2g cap sounds like a great idea.  Actually, for our mice, we were able to image successfully the brain and didn't really experience any problems with the base-plating. However, the only issue we have is with the mice phenotypes during the behavioral testing. Indeed, as we are working on AD mice after analyzing the behavior videos we found out that both the WT and AD mice behave differently than expected ( seems more anxious). Surprisingly, when we tested them again without the miniscopes, they behaved normally (as expected). As we run the tests for few weeks, we assumed that the mice were well acclimated to the miniscopes. Thus, we are thinking that the handling before the testing might be the issue, but not really sure.

Thank you very much for the tip, I'm gonna give it a try.

Best regards,

Zahra

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[kaizh...@gmail.com]

Hi Federico,

Could you please share the 3D printing files of a  dummy v3 miniscope?

Thank you so much!

Best regards,

KL

[Daniel Aharoni]

Hi! So sorry for the delay on this! Federico will post these to the Miniscope V4 GitHub repository, https://github.com/Aharoni-Lab/Miniscope-v4, tonight or tomorrow.