A key goal in behavioral phenotyping is the development of behavioral measures (endpoints) that are both discriminative across genetic strains and replicable across laboratories. Such endpoints are of crucial importance to the field of behavioral genetics, since those that are easily affected by slight environmental changes (and are therefore not replicable across laboratories) cannot be related to genomic data. Replicable endpoints are also of great importance in ethology, where innate behavior patterns are expected to be stable across a wide range of environments. Despite great efforts to standardize test and housing protocols, it has recently been shown that currently used behavioral phenotyping paradigms yield results that are often idiosyncratic to particular laboratories [1].

SEE (a software-supported Strategy for the Exploration of Exploration [2,3]) was developed to facilitate the generation of discriminative and replicable endpoints of open field locomotor behavior in different mouse strains. Key features of this strategy are: (i) simultaneous testing in multiple laboratories; (ii) large arena (2.5 m diameter), long session (30 min) and high tracking rate (30 Hz), providing high resolution in space and time; (iii) robust smoothing algorithms that reduce tracking noise; (iv) algorithmic identification of ethologically relevant behavior patterns; and only then (v) computation of a large number of measures for each separate pattern. In a study performed in three laboratories on ten of the most commonly used mouse strains, this strategy yielded replicable differences between strains in many behavioral endpoints. The results of this study will be presented.

Support: NIH grant #1 R01 NS40234-01; Mouse Phenome Project Collab. Program (The Jackson Laboratory).

References

1. Crabbe, J.C.; Wahlsten, D.; Dudek, B.C. (1999). Genetics of mouse behavior: Interactions with lab environment. Science, 284, 1670-1672.
2. Drai, D.; Golani, I. (2001). SEE: a tool for the visualization and analysis of rodent exploratory behavior. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 25 (5), 409-426.
3. Kafkafi, N. (submitted). Extending SEE for large-scale phenotyping of mouse open-field behavior.

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