Homecage Activity
A fully automatic analyze system is used to study unconstrained mouse behaviors in a home cage. Such device monitors daily life behaviors of mice when placed in a safe and comfortable environment same as TMC mouse hotel during the study. For example: 12:12-h light–dark cycle, constant control of temperature and humidity.
This non-stressful and non-invasive method is suitable to perform phenotyping for gene manipulations or drug administration, and to understand the correlation between pathological changes of nerve systems and external behaviors, such as monitoring the process of nerve degeneration diseases and side effects of drugs in nerve system. Abnormalities may also result from deviation caused by the irregular circadian rhythm of normal behaviors. This analyze system is able to monitor the subject twenty four hours a day to detect and record abnormal behaviors that do not normally occur. Such device can also generate analysis report and data to investigators for study.
Clever Sys HomeCageScanTM3.0 is the main software used for this service. This software would gather all information of the rodent body which includes head/mouth, ear, upper back, lower back, fore limb, hind limb, abdomen, tail, and mixture parts in order to analyze the relations between activities and body parts reaction when the subject is in motion. The position of the subject can be defined clearly instead of a point in space; therefore the behavioral patterns can be recognized more precisely. Currently this system can detect 22 behaviors simultaneously and determine the following behaviors with 80% accuracy including eating, drinking, walking, rearing up, resting, awakening, twitching, grooming, and hanging.
Homecage service is for black and agouti mice. If the hair of your mice are other colors, please contact TMC before you request the service.
For this experiment, it requires to be single housing for all genders of mice in TMC before doing the experiment. Please write down the single housing number on the check in form. After the experiment is done, the mice will be kept in single housing and the animal hotel fee will be charged as single housing.