ABSTRACT: Down syndrome (DS), or Trisomy 21, is a developmental disorder associated with intellectual disability and developmental delays that begin to manifest prenatally and extend throughout life. The advent of non-invasive prenatal testing that can detect DS in developing fetuses as early as 11-weeks gestation has created the opportunity to develop prenatal therapies to improve embryonic brain development and enhance neonatal cognitive functioning. The Bianchi lab hypothesizes that pharmacological therapies that target the atypical signaling pathways and cellular processes associated with DS—taken orally by pregnant women carrying a fetus diagnosed with DS—could improve brain wiring and growth, enhancing postnatal cognition. Several transgenic mouse model—including Ts65Dn, Ts1Cje, and Dp16—have been created in an attempt to accurately model the disorder, and the lab is investigating which mouse strain exhibits a behavioral and developmental phenotype that most closely resembles that seen in humans with DS. Currently, we are running neonatal behavioral paradigms on litters from each of the three mouse strains, and are using the software program ANY-maze to track and quantify the movement of each pup over time, to perform longitudinal analyses of neonatal motor development in each strain. This document serves as a comprehensive guide for creating, running, and collecting data from the “Neonatal Motor Development: Baseline” protocol in ANY-maze Behavioural Tracking Software.
Word Count: 215
READER’S PROFILE: I imagine a reader who is a new intern in the lab, and is overwhelmed with both the magnitude of the project they have been assigned and the amount of information in this document.
READER’S RESPONSE: Wow this is a long manual…I wonder if there was an easier way to display the settings selected for this particular protocol…I like the screenshots that show what the software looks like at various stages of the protocol creation part…The outline makes sense and is easy to follow, but there are just so many nuanced settings…I’m glad the document included an overview of the current research project, because I just couldn’t see how this task fit into the grand scheme of the lab’s research goals at first…I’m also glad that I didn’t have to create this protocol in the first place and that this document gives me a leg up in learning how to use some of the features that ANY-maze has to offer!
ABSTRACT:
Down syndrome (DS), or Trisomy 21, is a developmental disorder associated with intellectual disability and developmental delays that begin to manifest prenatally and extend throughout life. The advent of non-invasive prenatal testing that can detect DS in developing fetuses as early as 11-weeks gestation has created the opportunity to develop prenatal therapies to improve embryonic brain development and enhance neonatal cognitive functioning. The Bianchi lab hypothesizes that pharmacological therapies that target the atypical signaling pathways and cellular processes associated with DS—taken orally by pregnant women carrying a fetus diagnosed with DS—could improve brain wiring and growth, enhancing postnatal cognition. Several transgenic mouse model—including Ts65Dn, Ts1Cje, and Dp16—have been created in an attempt to accurately model the disorder, and the lab is investigating which mouse strain exhibits a behavioral and developmental phenotype that most closely resembles that seen in humans with DS. Currently, we are running neonatal behavioral paradigms on litters from each of the three mouse strains, and are using the software program ANY-maze to track and quantify the movement of each pup over time, to perform longitudinal analyses of neonatal motor development in each strain. This document serves as a comprehensive guide for creating, running, and collecting data from the “Neonatal Motor Development: Baseline” protocol in ANY-maze Behavioural Tracking Software.
Word Count: 215
READER’S PROFILE: I imagine a reader who is a new intern in the lab, and is overwhelmed with both the magnitude of the project they have been assigned and the amount of information in this document.
READER’S RESPONSE: Wow this is a long manual…I wonder if there was an easier way to display the settings selected for this particular protocol…I like the screenshots that show what the software looks like at various stages of the protocol creation part…The outline makes sense and is easy to follow, but there are just so many nuanced settings…I’m glad the document included an overview of the current research project, because I just couldn’t see how this task fit into the grand scheme of the lab’s research goals at first…I’m also glad that I didn’t have to create this protocol in the first place and that this document gives me a leg up in learning how to use some of the features that ANY-maze has to offer!