I am in the final stages of my PhD program in Sarkis Mazmanian lab at Caltech. We do a lot of PD research in various mouse models and use typical mouse motor assays, such as pole descent, beam traversal, hindlimb clasp, and rotarod test. My PhD project is focused on developing new practices in data collection and analysis in those assays that would help to extract more information from each assay, find more subtle phenotypes, offer new statistical analysis techniques, and, potentially, improve reproducibility of phenotypes across researchers and labs. Ideally, the result will be a Python package that people can easily use to apply the new pipeline in their own research. My advisor and I feel that now would be a great time to get feedback from the research community. So, if you are doing any or all of the motor assays listed above and would be interested in contributing a little bit of your time, please reach out to me! I would be happy to communicate in any way that works for you and make it as brief or long as you need.
Please help me create a good tool for all of us working with mouse PD models!
Ooh, this sounds like very interesting work! I don’t do any work with mice I’m afraid (my company uses zebrafish as a model organism), but I’m familiar with the challenges of characterizing phenotypes algorithmically. Wishing you luck with your PhD, and I’m interested to follow this project!
Hi @Nastya, welcome to the community and thank you for your post! Tagging some members below who have experience / interest in animal models, data collection, and/or Python.
Thank you very much for sharing your interesting work. We conduct mouse behavioral studies, including open field, rotarod, beam traversal, Barnes maze, and DigiGait analyses. It would be fantastic to have a user-friendly and standardized data analysis method that everyone can apply. I am keen to learn from you.
The package will only be working with the mentioned assays, but the approach can be used for any behavioral assay, so if there are people interested in adding to the package, ti would be great! We can talk more if you’d like.
As I mentioned to Francesca, while right now the package will only be adapted to hindlimb clasp, rotarod, beam traversal, and pole descent, people can add potentially add scripts for other assays as well if they are willing to write them. We can certainly talk more - let me know if you’d like to talk through Zoom!