If you are developing a rat model of your disease of interest, the UOttawa Behaviour and Physiology Core is here to help! We have significantly expanded our rat behaviour offerings and have added dedicated rat testing space to our facility. Assess your rat’s motor function using our rotarod, our open field activity recording system, our tapered beam, or our Digigait gait analysis system. If you’re studying how exercise affects your model, we offer home cage running wheels, a treadmill, and a swim tank for low-impact exercise. You can also measure body fat percentage with our EchoMRI and muscle strength with our grip strength meter. For neuroscience or neuropsychiatric researchers, we now have optimized protocols for novel object recognition, Morris water maze, contextual and cued fear conditioning, and our cutting edge Bussey-Saksida touchscreen system; we also offer Barnes and radial arm mazes.
If you have a test you would like to develop that is not listed here, our dedicated staff are always happy to help you design and optimize new tests.
For more information, please email (behcore@uOttawa.ca) , or see our website.