MARTINEAU & ASSOCIATES — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase II: 101

Description

Neuroscience and mental health research increasingly rely on zebrafishan animal model that ideally combines some of the best attributes of vertebrates and invertebratesThe zebrafish nervous system can be viewed as a much simplified blueprint of our human brain and its genome shares at leastof orthologous genes with oursIts wide behavioral repertoire has allowed unprecedented neuroscience experiments and high throughput chemical compound screens which have yielded unique insights to the molecular and neuronal workings of our central nervous system and the development of new therapeutic strategies for mental illnessHoweverzebrafish s small size and transparency have been a challenge for video based behavior analysis systemsresulting in paucity and rigidity of commercially available toolsSupporting only basic measuresthese tools typically require segregating individual larva in restrictive cells ofwell plateslimiting their expressible behavior repertoireWe have designed a novel imaging technology and developed a groundbreaking highly parallelhigh throughput behavior observation system t hat eliminates the need to segregate fish and provides measures of much higher statistical power than competitive systemsCalled Zebratrackthis easy to use system records and analyzes groups of zebrafish in Petri dish like containers in separate tank unit enclosures with dedicated camerasThe system efficiently and precisely extracts individual and population level behavior measures at high time resolution from hours to weeks long recordingsgenerates very low image data volumesand stores the data in a web accessible repositorySystem operationbrowsing of data and past recordingsand on demand data analysis are all performed via a web browserWe plan to productize this system as a platform available in various configurations assembled from modular tank unitsAimand sharing a common software architectureAimand data repositoryAimWe plan to commercialize the Zebratrack platform along an Instrument As A Service model and make the data repository available for search and data storage to our subscribersWith configurations starting at $ kthe technology will be accessible to any laboratoryZebratrack will bring analytical tools of unparalleled statistical power to behavioral sciences and mental health research and expands the usability of zebrafish in experiments and longitudinal studies never before conceivableNot only will neuroscientists be able to detect and measure subtle or transient phenotypic variations to investigate the complex gene interactions present in many psychiatric disordersbut they also will be able to leveragethrough the repositorythe cumulated values of the past experiments of the entire user communityUnbridling zebrafish behavioral power for genetic and compound screens and introducing unprecedented data sharing capabilitiesZebratrack will enable major strides in neuroscience and mental health research We have designed Zebratracka groundbreaking video monitoring proofofconcept system to analyzethe behavior of zebrafish without having to segregate fish individuallyWe will productize thissystem as a robusthighly parallelhigh throughput behavior analysis platform and data repositorytobring tools of unprecedented behavior capture quality and accuracy with unparalleledstatistical power to neuroscience and mental health research andenable unprecedented datasharing capabilitiesWe believe Zebratrackby unbridling the unique potential of the zebrafishvertebrate modelwill enable the major strides in neuroscience and mental health research neededto understand the inner workings of the brain and discover new therapies for mental illness