One of the first outcomes of joint collaboration Preclinical Phenotyping Core Facility – pcPHENO from Vienna Biocenter Core Facilities (VBCF, Austria) and Animal Center – AC (from FNUSA-ICRC, Czech Republic) under the RIAT-CZ project (called “Creating synergies between research infrastructures to stimulate innovation in the cross-border region”) took place on May 23th 2017 in FNUSA-ICRC, Brno. This project is funded by INTERREG AT-CZ, the programme supporting Czech-Austrian cross-border collaboration. In addition to FNUSA-ICRC and VBCF (Lead partner), the project includes also the CEITEC MU, CEITEC BUT and IST Austria.
The organized workshop was focused on sharing strategies to set-up and develop best practices for behavioural tests in rodents. Often, mice and rats are used as disease models in which cognitive, learning and/or motor functions are impaired. Proper testing and analysis of results are needed to translate these data to humans. Speakers from 4 Institutes (Silvie Bělašková and Viola Galligioni from FNUSA-ICRC in Brno; Sylvia Badurek from VBCF, Tsung-Pin Pai from Research Institute of Molecular Pathology and Lukasz Piszczek from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna) and 1 company (Daniela Oettler from TSE-Systems, Germany) provided insights into experimental design, data reproducibility, procedures and technologies available for behavioural experiments and case studies on Parkinson and pathological impulsivity models.
