Mouse Village funded by the ERC-PoC

We are happy to announce that our project “The Mouse Village: a fully automated training platform for the development of behavioral biomarkers in brain disorders” will be funded by an ERC-Proof-of-Concept grant. This project is based on the work of Rafael Marín and Balma Serrano that developed the first pilot version of the Mouse Village, an automated platform to train mice in a complex visuo-spatial working memory task.

In this new project, we propose to take animal behavioral experimentation into a new level which fully capitalizes on automatization. We will design, build and test a new version of the Mouse Village (MV), an open source behavioral platform in which animals are housed and trained in a self-paced manner, without any human intervention. In the MV groups of mice live freely in complex arenas simulating their natural burrow systems, displaying complex social interactions while progressively learning one or several cognitive tasks in exchange for food or water. Cognitive testing takes place in an all-purpose touchscreen operant box connected to the system (Fig. 3a). Social interactions are inferred from the trajectories of each animal across the system using RFID antennas. Critically, animal tracking and access to the touch screen chamber is controlled by the Python-based software Environment PyVillage which works as a task parser, supervising the individual learning of each animal and generating periodic reports for experimental monitoring. Because experiments run 24/7, the operant box is maximally used, eliminating the need of scaled-up racks with dozens of boxes and reducing the maintenance time. In this project we will expand the pilot Mouse Village we have built and tested in the last year under our ERC-CoG-2015-PRIORS using a complex working memory mouse task. We will improve both the hardware implementation and the software to program it as well as test it using a few standard cognitive tasks commonly used in neuroscience. Finally, we will distribute it as an open source commercially available system to the community.

Now it is time to improve, test and share the Mouse Village!

More info about ERC-Proof-of-Concept grants here.