Sylics and Noldus combine forces for automated behavioural screening

Sylics recently signed a strategic partnership agreement with Noldus Information Technology, a company developing software and hardware for behavioural research based in Wageningen, The Netherlands. With both companies providing innovative solutions for preclinical neuroscience, this partnership opens up new opportunities for integrated and automated behavioural screening for scientists worldwide.

Integrated solution Noldus and Sylics combined forces and developed a complete solution consisting of PhenoTyper® home-cage monitoring, EthoVision® XT video tracking, and AHCODA™ testing protocols and cloud-based data analysis. This facilitates the 24/7 assessment of cognition, anxiety, and motor function in rodents in a home-cage environment, guarantees high quality data, and provides comprehensive graphs and statistics. New CognitionWall This partnership also entails the reselling of the CognitionWall™ by Noldus as a new add-on for the PhenoTyper home-cage. The CognitionWall was designed and validated by researchers at Sylics for sophisticated cognitive tests, such as discrimination and reversal learning. These tests can be used for rapid, sensitive, and reproducible assessment of cognitive impairments in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Research advances PhenoTyper is an instrumented cage that can be used for home-cage testing, allowing prolonged studies and minimal or no handling of animals prior to testing. EthoVision XT software provides the tracking and activity recording of the animals, and delivers an extensive data set. For straight-forward testing (such as activity, locomotion, etc.), data selection and statistical analyses provided by EthoVision XT suffice, but for a more sophisticated analysis of rodent behaviour, AHCODA provides the ideal solution. It can be used to dissect spontaneous behaviour in great detail, evaluate cognitive function and anxiety, and other disease-specific behavioural parameters. This makes the complete solution of Noldus and Sylics particularly suited for the integral analysis of many behavioural parameters with the aim to detect behavioural effects induced by genetic mutations, chemical compounds and environmental manipulations. Examples and demonstrations Examples of research can be found at www.sylics.com and www.noldus.com. The system will also be demonstrated at Neuroscience 2015 the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Chicago, 17-21 October), as well as BIO Europe (Munich, 2-4 November).