We aim at analyzing social behaviors of mice in order to deconstruct the circuitry involved in social contexts.
The Live Mouse Tracker (LMT)
We apply this validated open-source technology, in order to study the more naturalistic social behaviors occurring within groups of mice over longer periods of time, compared to classical video-based laboratory techniques.
Groups of mice are housed in the LMT for several days and are allowed to express all their natural behaviors. The LMT, using machine learning and a RFID tags, can follow up to 4 animals simultaneously and extract a variety of different social interactions and behaviors. The post-processing, based on Python programming, offers endless possibilities to improve the range of analyses.
Social Fear Conditioning
This protocol allows to condition mice to express a generalized fear of a social context which is important to reproduce in order to study social anxiety disorders.
A mouse is conditioned to be afraid of a ‘social stimulus’. This elicits a generalized social fear conditioning.