Automatic analysis of motor behavior in mice

Han Hua, the brain intelligence center of Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, assisted Yang Dan, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, through the automatic analysis of the motor behavior characteristics of captive mice, and came to the conclusion that sleep wake brain state and motor behavior are jointly regulated by specific neuron clusters in the substantia nigra reticular nucleus The results of this study are as follows: a common hub for Sleep and motor control in the substance nigra was published online on January 24 in science, Vol 367, issue 6476, 24 Jan 2020 The potential mechanism of neural circuits to coordinate brain wake-up and motor activity is not clear This study found that specific neuronal clusters in the substantia nigra reticular (SNR) jointly regulate the brain state and motor behavior of sleep and wake By analyzing the motor behavior of cage mice, we can determine four states with different levels of brain wake-up and motor activity: motor, non motor, quiet awake and sleep; transition is not random, but mainly occurs between neighboring states Glutamate decarboxylase-2 (gad2) instead of small albumin (PV) positive neuron subsets are preferentially active in low motor activity and wakeup state Their activation and deactivation affect the direction of natural behavior change, and promote or inhibit sleep These GABAergic neurons integrate a wide range of input signals, and control multiple stimulation and motion control circuits through a large number of collateral projections, so as to analyze the neural loop mechanism of the group of neurons involved in coordinated regulation of sleep and motion The above work was led by Yang Dan research group of the University of California, Berkeley, USA the Han Hua team of the Institute of automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the se bum Paik team of the Korean Academy of science and Technology participated in the work In this study, Han Hua's team worked closely with Liu danqian, Ph.D., Yang Dan Laboratory (the first paper), to establish a set of automatic analysis methods and data processing flow for the motion behavior of cage mice, including recording video based on cage mice The natural brain state and motor behavior of experimental mice were characterized by accurate location and tracking, motor state analysis and EEG / EMG classification Through the automatic analysis of hundreds of cage mice videos (300000 frames / video), it is found that there is a high correspondence between the motor behavior characteristics of mice and the EEG / EMG characteristics The statistical results show that the transformation of motor behavior of mice mainly occurs between adjacent states, rather than randomly, which reveals the change rule of motor state of mice This is one of the important innovations of this study, which provides important data support for the main conclusions of the paper The experimental design and result analysis are shown in the figure below (Figure 1 of the main body of the paper) In the follow-up study, the research team will refine the automatic analysis method for the motion behavior of cage mice, develop an open-source tool set for the analysis of the motion behavior of cage mice, provide a powerful tool for the study of individual behavior of animals, which can be applied to the model animals of sports diseases, and provide support for the development process of the motion behavior disorders of these diseases Further consideration, this tool can be extended to analyze the interaction behavior of multiple mice, which can be used to study the complex social behavior of animals