Neuroscience 2022 - Ugo Basile - Booth 632

• Current status of thermal preference and analgesia studies
• Understand the research improvements of the new bias free device
• Thermal Gradient Ring technology, results and benefits
• Q&A Session with the method inventor

University of Erlangen-Nuremberg - Experimental pain research

To overcome current limitations we have designed a novel device that is automated, provides a high degree of freedom, i.e. thermal choice, and eliminates experimenter bias. 

The device represents a thermal gradient assay designed as a circular running track. It allows discerning exploratory behavior from thermal selection behavior and provides increased accuracy by providing measured values in duplicate and by removing edge artifacts.

The TGR can clearly discriminate temperature-dependent phenotypes or temperature dependent drug effects.

It records and analyses thermal preference phenotyping in mice. For neuropathic pain studies, peripheral neuropathy, temperature sensitivity and insensitivity assessment in basic research, phenotyping and drug screening.

The animal is freely moving, its position is tracked by a camera, and no user intervention is required to gather time spent in each temperature zone (24 zones in duplicate) and many other parameters.

In the TGR mice can freely move around the ring floor, thereby avoiding the stereotypical habit that mice have of staying in a corner, as occurs in rectangular systems.

It is a cost effective and bias-free tool to obtain reproducible data in a very broad range of thermal stimulation experiments.

• Attentional set-shifting today
• Method and outcome improvements with the Operon
• Live demonstration
• Q&A Session with Edoardo Pisa, Ph.D.

Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Rome) - Centre for Behavioral Sciences and Mental Health

Cognitive flexibility involves the capacity to rapidly switch between different perspectives and implement novel strategies to cope with adverse situations or changed circumstances. 

Most tasks used to assess cognitive flexibility, in both humans and nonhuman animals, evaluate the individual capability to acquire a rule in order to obtain a reward and to subsequently disregard such rule in favor of a new one (mental set-shifting), once the learning criterion has been attained by trial and error.

Set-shifting task has proven to be an effective preclinical tool for drug testing and genetic screening, with direct translational valence in healthy humans and patients with schizophrenia.

The Ugo Basile Operon automatizes the Intra-/Extra-dimensional (ID/ED) attentional set-shifting battery of tests offering visual, olfactory and tactile stimulations, all controlled by software and coupled to a 10-channel unique odor delivery system. 

Thanks to the continuos collaboration with professors and researchers from all over the world our R&D department never stop creating and improving devices. Congresses like Neuroscience 2022 are the perfect place for us to officialy present 

You will find us at booth n°632 with many interesting novelties and lot of improvements on the traditional instruments we produce since 1963.