Analysis of locomotor behavior in the German Mouse Clinic.

Background: Generation and phenotyping of mutant mouse models continues to increase along with the search for the most efficient phenotyping tests. Here we asked if a combination of different locomotor tests is necessary for comprehensive locomotor phenotyping, or if a large data set from an automated gait analysis with the CatWalk system would suffice.

New Method: First we endeavored to meaningfully reduce the large CatWalk data set by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to decide on the most relevant parameters.