The Mouse Village: a fully automated behavioral system for continuous social and cognitive testing

Introduction

Drug discovery in mental health is undergoing a crisis. Characterizing a new generation of biomarkers for the different disorders seems the promising path towards developing new treatments. Biomarkers, including behavioral biomarkers, are quantitative observables that are altered and can be used for diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment response monitoring.

Importance of Translational Biomarkers

Importantly for preclinical research, these biomarkers should be translational and work across species. However, experiments in rodents are largely based on paradigms that are disparate from those used in humans.

Challenges in Rodent Training

Training rodents in more human-like tasks has a strong translational potential, but it has important shortcomings:

1. It requires developing finely-controlled tasks involving long training periods.
2. It consumes a lot of animals.
3. It ultimately induces very elevated personnel costs.

To confront this experimental bottleneck, neuroscience and pharmaceutical laboratories are trying to automatize their methods. However, most systems still rely on human intervention, require animal manipulation, and impose a high maintenance toll.

Project Overview

Leveraging our experience building behavioral systems during our ERC-CoG-2015, we will design, build, and distribute the Mouse Village (MV), a new fully-automated open platform in which mice self-train 24/7 in different cognitive tasks while displaying complex social interactions without human intervention.

System Design

The MV consists of a system of cages connected to an operant touchscreen chamber that can implement multiple cognitive tasks. We will build on a previously developed pilot MV by introducing a more modular and flexible design and validate the system using several standard social and cognitive tests.

Community Sharing and Impact

The MV will be shared with the community under Open Software and Hardware licenses. By eliminating the experimental bottleneck imposed by behavioral experiments, the MV has the potential to accelerate the search for new biomarkers of brain disorders and have a substantial impact on mental health.