Measuring Behavior in the Home Cage: Study Design, Applications, Challenges, and Perspectives.

The reproducibility crisis (or replication crisis) in biomedical research is a particularly existential and under-addressed issue in the field of behavioral neuroscience, where, in spite of efforts to standardize testing and assay protocols, several known and unknown sources of confounding environmental factors add to variance. Human interference is a major contributor to variability both within and across laboratories, as well as novelty-induced anxiety. Attempts to reduce human interference and to measure more "natural" behaviors in subjects has led to the development of automated home-cage monitoring systems.

A novel 3D method of locomotor analysis in adult zebrafish: Implications for automated detection of CNS drug-evoked phenotypes.

Background: Expanding the spectrum of organisms to model human brain phenotypes is critical for our improved understanding of the pathobiology of neuropsychiatric disorders. Given the clear limitations of existing mammalian models, there is an urgent need for low-cost, high-throughput in-vivo technologies for drug and gene discovery.

New Method: Here, we introduce a new automated method for generating 3D (X,Y,Z) swim trajectories in adult zebrafish (Danio rerio), to improve their neurophenotyping.

An automated system for the recognition of various specific rat behaviours.

The automated measurement of rodent behaviour is crucial to advance research in neuroscience and pharmacology. Rats and mice are used as models for human diseases; their behaviour is studied to discover and develop new drugs for psychiatric and neurological disorders and to establish the effect of genetic variation on behavioural changes. Such behaviour is primarily labelled by humans.

Automated high-throughput neurophenotyping of zebrafish social behavior.

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are rapidly becoming an important model organism in neuroscience research, representing an excellent species to study complex social phenotypes. Zebrafish actively form shoals, which can be used to quantify their shoaling behaviors, highly sensitive to various experimental manipulations. Recent advances in video-tracking techniques have enabled simultaneous tracking of multiple subjects, previously assessed by manual scoring of animal behavior.