Rodent Behavior Core

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Abstract - Rodent Behavior Core Our Center will have a Rodent Behavior Core to give scientific support to the animal research teams. This Core will provide the program team with services that are critical to the Center’s success. The Core will perform pain/control surgeries in rats and mice for all the laboratories involved in the Center. Most importantly the core will perform a whole set of behavioral tests to assess the multiple components of the neuropathic pain phenotype and its effect on drug seeking behavior. Having a common space to perform all the behavioral tests will allow higher reproducibility of these complex protocols. Along this line, the Core personnel will not only perform the behavioral assessments, but will also provide training and supervision to external personnel that will be designated by the individual laboratories part of this Center Grant to help with the tests. The Core will further aim to optimize and refine the behavioral protocols to ideally suit them to assess the complex behavioral interaction between pain and drug seeking phenotype. The results of such effort will be summarized in highly detailed standard operating procedures that will be posted online and will be available to the entire scientific community. Finally, the Core will allow laboratories currently not directly involved with pain and/ or drug addiction research to become involved in this type of research by providing them with preliminary data critical to apply for external funding. Thus, this Core will play a critical role in expanding the scientific community interested in this very important topic, which represents one of the most urgent priorities for NIH.