The IntelliCage - Automated behavioral phenotyping in rodents

Schedule: Thursday 7th June 17:00 - 17:30, G34

Presenter: Holger Russig

TSE Systems has over 130 years of expertise in developing and manufacturing sophisticated life science research equipment. Today, using the latest technology, we are world's leading provider of highly customizable metabolic and behavioral phenotyping equipment.

Complex behavioral paradigms can be achieved with our IntelliCage system. It allows the evaluation of behavior and cognitive performance of individual mice or rats while they are living in a social group of up to 16 cage mates. This unique principle fosters normal social behavior in an enriched, highly standardized home cage environment, thereby ensuring a high level of animal welfare and minimizing the need for human intervention or single test apparatuses. The IntelliCage decreases the variability of stress reactions in mice and therefore provides consistent data across laboratories. It has been used to transfer standard mouse tests to assess e.g. exploratory behavior, activity, spatial learning, operant/associative learning, memory and animal tests of anxiety. The preprogrammed tasks are evaluated seamlessly by specialized integrated fully automated operant conditioning corners. Each animal is equipped with a RFID transponder/unique tag number and recognized as it enters the conditioning corner. Also the transponders allow the selection of specific animals out of the group, via an animal gate the IntelliCage expands to a multi-area system, where fully customizable arenas and mazes can be added to create the PhenoWorld, the behavioral testing standard of the future.

In this session, we introduce the IntelliCage and discuss recent scientific applications of the system.