The BACHD Rat Model of Huntington Disease Shows Specific Deficits in a Test Battery of Motor Function.

: Huntington disease (HD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by motor, cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms. HD is usually diagnosed by the appearance of motor deficits, resulting in skilled hand use disruption, gait abnormality, muscle wasting and choreatic movements. The BACHD transgenic rat model for HD represents a well-established transgenic rodent model of HD, offering the prospect of an in-depth characterization of the motor phenotype.

Home-cage anxiety levels in a transgenic rat model for Spinocerebellar ataxia type 17 measured by an approach-avoidance task: The light spot test.

Background: Measuring anxiety in a reliable manner is essential for behavioural phenotyping of rodent models such as the rat model for Spinocerebellar ataxia type 17 (SCA17) where anxiety is reported in patients. An automated tool for assessing anxiety within the home cage can minimize human intervention, stress of handling, transportation and novelty.

New Method: We applied the anxiety test "light spot" (LS) (white led directed at the food-hopper) to our transgenic SCA17 rat model in the PhenoTyper 4500 to extend the knowledge of this automated tool for behavioural phenotyping and to verify an anxiety-like phenotype at three different disease stages for use in future therapeutic studies.

Learning to recognize rat social behavior: Novel dataset and cross-dataset application.

Background: Social behavior is an important aspect of rodent models. Automated measuring tools that make use of video analysis and machine learning are an increasingly attractive alternative to manual annotation. Because machine learning-based methods need to be trained, it is important that they are validated using data from different experiment settings.

Anxiety and risk assessment-related traits in a rat model of Spinocerebellar ataxia type 17.

Anxiety as a common feature of several neurodegenerative/polyglutamine diseases is an important aspect for the face validity of an animal model for Spinocerebellar Ataxia type 17 (SCA17). Risk assessment and anxiety-like traits were characterised in 3-6-9 months old rats of a transgenic model for SCA17 using the standard behavioural test elevated plus maze. In addition, c-Fos immunostainings in the basolateral amygdala evaluated neuronal activation in correlation to the behavioural responses.

Automated quantitative analysis to assess motor function in different rat models of impaired coordination and ataxia.

Background: An objective and automated method for assessing alterations in gait and motor coordination in different animal models is important for proper gait analysis. The CatWalk system has been used in pain research, ischemia, arthritis, spinal cord injury and some animal models for neurodegenerative diseases.

New Method: Our goals were to obtain a comprehensive gait analysis of three different rat models and to identify which motor coordination parameters are affected and are the most suitable and sensitive to describe and detect ataxia with a secondary focus on possible training effects.