Modern Behavioural Diagnostics
The past decades have brought unprecedented advances in our understanding of brain function. This had a great impact on the fields of neurology and psychiatry. However, relating this increased functional knowledge of the brain to behavioural traits has been slow to keep up. This severely limits our ability to gain insights into neuropsychiatric pathologies.
The use of laboratory rodents for behavioural studies in neurology and psychiatry is increasingly becoming more important. Yet diagnostic tools often lack specificity and the capacity for high throughput. The urgent need for more neuroethological approaches and more automation of behavioural tests is where we at the Berlin Mouse Clinic see our mission.
The Goal
Our goal is to overcome limited test batteries and to provide a broad array of state-of-the-art behavioural tools to understand phenotypes and rodent cognition. This is achieved in a collaborative approach by providing expertise for behavioural diagnostics through consultation, experimental planning, experimentation and data analysis. Novel tools for behavioural diagnostics are developed by the clinic’s engineering group, mainly through development of automated equipment and analytical tools for large animal behaviour datasets. Our team systematically works towards offering and developing:
- Ethologically reasonable and less stressful behavioural assays,
- Increased automation (easier to handle) and higher throughput testing.
- A larger test diversity