Rodent Behavioral Core

The Emory University Rodent Behavioral Core (RBC) is supported by the Emory University School of Medicine and is one of the Emory Integrated Core Facilities (EICF). We plan, execute, and analyze behavioral experiments examining activity, arousal, coordinated movement, learning and memory, anxiety, depression, seizure susceptibility, reward/reinforcement, and aggression in mice and rats.

If you use the RBC for your research, please acknowledge the RBC in your publications and include its RRID (RRID:SCR_012499).

Services offered by the Emory RBC:

Locomotor activity

1. Novelty-induced locomotor activity

2. Circadian rhythm

3. Voluntary wheel running

Arousal and attention

1. Behavioral sleep latency

2. Latent inhibition

Coordinated movement

1. Rotarod
2. Grid performance test
3. Beam traversal
4. Pole test

Learning and memory

1. Morris water maze

2. Radial arm maze

3. Y-maze

4. Social memory/discrimination test paradigm

5. Novel Object Recognition

6. Fear Conditioning

7. Various mouse touchscreen tasks (including 5-CSRTT)

Anxiety/Stress

1. Elevated plus maze

2. Light/dark box

3. Open field

4. Social defeat

Depression

1. Forced swim test

2. Tail suspension test

3. Novelty-suppressed feeding

4. Chronic unpredictable stress

5. Sucrose consumption/preference

6. Social defeat

Seizure susceptibility

1. Flurothyl seizure chamber
2. Kanic acid seizures
3. Pentylenetetrazole seizures
4. Bicuculline seizures
5. Audiogenic seizures
6. Increasing current electroshock seizures
7. Pilocarpine seizures

Reward/Reinforcement

1. Drug-induced locomotor activity

2. Drug-induced stereotypy

3. Sensitization

4. Conditioned place preference

5. Oral self-administration

6. Operant drug self-administration and reinstatement

7. Operant drug discrimination

8. Operant cocaine vs. food choice

Aggression

1. Resident-intruder aggression

2. Social defeat

Sensorimotor Gating

1. Acoustic startle

2. Prepulse inhibition

Pain Sensitivty

1. Von Frey test

2. Hot/Cold plate