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0:00
Hi.
I am Jacqueline Crawley
at the MIND Institute
at the University of California,
Davis in Sacramento in the US.
And we'll be talking to you today
about behavioral phenotyping
of mouse models of neuropsychiatric
and neurodevelopmental disorders,
a field that our Behavioral
Neuroscience Laboratory has
been working on for over 30 years.
0:26
The fundamental question
that you might ask
is, why would one bother using an
animal model in the first place?
How do animal models contribute
to biomedical research?
Basically, we're designing
research tools that will allow us
to discover the functions of
known and newly discovered genes,
or signaling proteins,
neurotransmitters, their receptors,
anatomical pathways,
epigenetic mechanisms,
specifically to understand
the causes of a human disease.
If we have a good
model, it then becomes
a pre-clinical tool that
tests potential treatments
for their efficacy and safety.
1:08
We understand completely,
particularly in terms
of psychiatric disorders, that we
can't anthropomorphize from a mouse
to a human, that
we're not pretending
that we work on an anxious,
depressed, schizophrenic, or
autistic mouse.
We never use those terms in our lab.
What we're doing is employing the
mouse behaviors that have features
that are similar to
the human symptoms,
or causes that are
similar to those that
are known to cause
the human disease,
or the same response
to a therapeutic drug.
And again, the goal is to
test hypotheses about causes
and to evaluate the potential
usefulness of treatments
of the human disorder.
