Animal Research Activity Monitor

Climbing behavior can be of interest for the most diverse applications.

The Ugo Basile automated system replicates its first manual application in the Pain field, for measuring Pain-Depressed behavior. It showed that, while mild analgesics block pain-depressed climbing, strong analgesics fail to alleviate depression of climbing (Santos et al. 2023, “Climbing behavior by mice as an endpoint for preclinical assessment of drug effects in the absence and presence of pain”, Frontiers).

Background

The device, developed in collaboration with the laboratory of Prof. Sidney Negus from Virginia Commonwealth University, provides a measurement of the vertical movement of rodents, a parameter which has not been widely investigated so far, in spite of the fact that rodents are animals that live in a 3D space and hence the analysis of XY position only is a limitation in many current studies.

However, climbing behavior and vertical movements have been previously studied in non-automated experiments to investigate many fields, from muscle strength (Ueno et al. 2022), to antidepressants (Perona et al. 2008), stroke (Jin et al., 2017), Parkinson’s (Sundstrom et al., 1990), sex-differences (Borbelyova et al., 2019), locomotor activity and kinematics (Green et al., 2012), neuroleptics and dopamine agonists (Costall et al., 1982; Pinsky et al., 1988; Medvedev et al., 2013), XYZ activity (Wexler et al. 2018), opioid receptors (Michael-Titus et al., 1989), neuropathic and cancer pain (Falk et al., 2017).