In collaboration with the lab of Dr. Jason Snyder, we have taken on a neurogenesis project to investigate the role of postnatally-born neurons in tuning the developing hippocampus to environmentally-relevant sensory features.

These adult born neurons are thought to become attuned to specific features present in the environment, enhancing adulthood learning in the environmental sculpting hypothesis.

We will be testing this hypothesis by exposing adolescent mice to specific visual features, and then silencing newborn neurons at certain critical periods of development to elucidate their role in sculpting hippocampal circuits.

For this project we have designed a custom exposure cage (pictured on the right) which will house our mice for 5 weeks, spanning a critical neurogenesis developmental period. The juvenile exposure cage was designed with 6 LCD screens and 6 screen-controller units connected in series.

To explore whether the mice’s brains have been shaped by adolescent stimuli exposure, we have designed a custom touchscreen testing chamber for behavioural testing in adulthood.

The chamber features three touchscreens, a liquid reward dispenser, a reward buzzer and light, and a camera for behaviour monitoring. All hardware is controlled through raspberry pi circuit boards running custom code, which can be easily adjusted to vary task stimuli or structure.

All designs and code will be made open source for other researchers to explore the power of this cheap to make, easy to adapt cognitive testing chamber!