Giselle Haddad
Research Mentor: Lauren Fish
Mentor Department: Neurology- Kaczorowski lab, Medicine
Author(s): Giselle Haddad, Alexa Toth, Eshardeep Kalsi, Lauren Fish, Shannon Moore, Catherine Kaczorowski
Session: Session 2 (10:00 AM – 10:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 121
Abstract
Many experiments in our lab use contextual fear conditioning to identify mice that are resilient to cognitive aging. In contextual fear conditioning, a shock is administered to an animal in a new environment (training day), and its memory of the environment is assessed the next day (testing day) with no shocks administered. The fear response is documented by measuring the mouse’s movement after shock exposure on training day and during the testing period. A potential confound of this assay is the variability of animals’ responses to the initial shocks presented. To ensure that our fear conditioning data reflect differences in memory and not shock reactivity, we developed a sensitive, unbiased, high-throughput computational method to compare the shock reactivity of each mouse. Through machine learning and R programming, the shock reactivity data were collected and processed to produce average velocity graphs of each mouse’s reaction to the shock. We first validated our pipeline by assessing mice that received shocks of two different intensities. To quantitatively compare the groups, the average of the velocities after the four shocks per mouse and the average of the velocities after each shock across mice will be compared using an appropriate statistical test. We expect to see higher velocity after the higher intensity shock. The validation data generated during this analysis will give us more confidence that differences in fear conditioning responses can be more directly attributed to learning and memory. For our first experiment, we are testing the hypothesis that there should be no change in shock reactivity that occurs with age. To test this, we looked for shock reactivity differences between two groups of female mice: aged vs. young. The data show a sharp, comparable increase in velocity around the time of each shock of similar magnitude in both young and aged mice. If confirmed statistically, this lack of difference between the groups would support our hypothesis.
