Automated kinematic analysis of pre-pluse inhibition in larval zebrafish

honors thesisCollege of EngineeringBiomedical EngineeringAdam DouglassAnimals differentially ignore or attend to sensory information depending on their immediate environment. A significant example of this phenomenon is audiomotorpre-pulse inhibition (PPI), in which the startle response to a loud noise is suppressed by a preceding stimulus of lower intensity. This ability to optimize behavior in response to environmental context is anessential brain function. Defects in PPI are associated with neurological disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette Syndrome, and schizophrenia. As part of an effort to develop a restrained, larval zebrafish model of PPI, we created new software to analyze swim kinematics in behaving fish. Our programs automatically extract several kinematic parameters from image sequences of behaving animals and use them to classify behavior into one of three, stereotyped categories. Correct classification is reported in 96.32 percent of trials (n = 162). This automated analysis will now permit a more robust study of PPI in these animals, where the brain's experimental accessibility will allow us to discover the cellular bases of sensorimot filtering