Quantifying dynamic, complex social communication in freely interacting mice

Quantifying dynamic, complex social communication in freely interacting mice

Presenters: The Neunuebel Neuroscience Lab (Neural Basis of Social Behavior)

In the animal kingdom, innate social behaviors play a crucial role in survival and reproduction. For mice, these complex and dynamic behaviors are accompanied by ultrasonic vocalizations. Although recent work has shown that male and female mice vocally interact during courtship, the role these auditory sensory signals play in shaping social behavior remains a mystery. To elucidate the impact communication has on the development of mouse social behavior, our lab simultaneously records audio and video data of freely socializing mice for extended periods of time. The data in each of these recordings can exceed half-a-terabyte, which makes manually finding social information unfeasible; therefore, our lab has created a high throughput data analysis pipeline that rapidly extracts information crucial for quantifying social interactions. I will describe the tools we need to interpret social behavior and how we setup our data analysis pipeline on the University of Delaware’s high performance computer cluster (Farber). Finally, I will reveal some of our lab’s preliminary results that emerged from our data analysis pipeline, which lays the groundwork for a mechanistic dissection of communication during social behavior.