The CPL maintains a set of rodent behavioral testing equipment (mostly for mice, but we have some rat-size equipment as well) which we can make available to other Cornell scientists and laboratories, generally but not exclusively on a collaborative basis.
As of 2014, we now administer a dedicated behavioral phenotyping facility within the ECRF at the Veterinary College.
We are not a Cornell University core facility, but our successive collaborations have evolved into a sort of ‘co-op core’. There are no fees, but typically labs will chip in for additional equipment that they may need for their study and then leave it with the co-op for future use. Scheduling depends on many factors, primarily how heavily the facility is being used. Ideally, labs will provide their own personnel to run the studies; however, we can help recruit undergraduate research assistants for this purpose. We can train personnel as needed and help with data analysis. Labs will need to add the behavioral studies and facility room(s) to their IACUC protocols before starting work.
Our original set of equipment was acquired with funding from the Cornell Center for Vertebrate Genomics (CVG) to support behavioral phenotyping, so we are particularly friendly to working with CVG member labs.
Useful Information
We intend to describe some of the equipment that we have in this space, and summarize the goals and strategies of behavioral analysis and phenotyping that we employ. But, as of this writing, we haven’t done so. Please contact Thomas Cleland for further information.