LIN Seminar: Genetic and behavioral dissection of pain neural circuits by Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, University of Pennsylvania
September 26, 2019
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Host: Aixa Alfonso
Abstract: Behavioral studies in rodents are widely used to uncover the mechanisms governing pain transmission and to develop analgesics that are potent, safe, and specific. However, pain is a highly subjective experience, making simple and objective assessments of rodent pain behavior highly challenging. Here, we record behavior across eight inbred mouse strains at 2,000 frames per second and use markerless tracking to construct sub-second behavioral ethograms associated with innocuous and noxious mechanical stimuli applied to the hind paw. Next, using a customized software package, we automatically scored ten distinct movement features across all behavioral trials. We then successfully separated painful from non-painful withdrawal responses using linear discriminant analysis. This work builds on our manually scored platform (Abdus-Saboor et al., Cell Reports, 2019) and demonstrates that combining high-speed videography with automated tracking and scoring reduces time spent manually scoring reflexive pain behavior and minimizes potential human error or bias. The paw withdrawal reflex is the most commonly used assay in preclinical pain research; this platform increases the utility of these studies by quantifying objective behavioral proxies for the actual sensation an animal is experiencing. Imitating from our work studying pain across difference mouse strains, we uncovered exciting differences in thermally induced escape responses. I will also introduce these studies and share ongoing and future directions related to this.
Date posted
May 15, 2019
Date updated
Sep 6, 2019