fairfolio
Saved Projects

Hot Button: Non-Invasive Approach for Studying Emotion States in Mice

ISEF · 2024 Animal Sciences

Backer Peral, David · La Canada High School

Overview

Aggression, fear, and mating are innate behaviors in most vertebrate animal species, including humans. Research to understand the brain circuits that control these emotions is important to develop treatments for various neurological disorders. The ability to genetically modify mice and then elicit emotions in a controlled manner has allowed researchers to advance in this field. My research focuses on a non-invasive methodology to evaluate and quantify emotion states in mice using a thermography camera to measure body temperature, which I then correlate with the emotion states. First, I assembled the equipment and developed the necessary software for data acquisition and synchronizing the thermography camera with the rest of the lab instrumentation. Then, I collected data, analyzed it using custom tools, and conducted control experiments to test the validity of this approach. My research provides statistical evidence that activation of aggression neurons leads to an increase in the mice’s head temperature, as captured by the thermography camera, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the non-invasive apparatus I developed. When using a similar approach to study fear neurons, the results were unexpected. There was a temperature increase, even greater than that with aggression neuron activation, but no temperature increase with natural fear stimulation. This opens up some intriguing questions about these brain circuits that require further investigation. My current research utilizes these tools I developed to study other brain regions, such as those involved in mating. Finally, I designed a miniature head-mounted camera for recording the facial expressions of mice within an unrestricted environment as an additional metric of a mouse’s emotion state.

Competition history

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google