Animal models

ESSENCE LINE provides preclinical CNS diseases models in mice and rats. The models are well established and developed in cooperation with experts from academia. We offer testing of motoric, behavioral and cognitive functions in rodents. Do you need to asses an effect of your drug on a cognition or memory? Contact us! Our capability goes beyond typical imagination. We use cognitive tasks with higher cognitive demands than the classical paradigms.
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Animal models

- Schizophrenia (MK-801)
- Alzheimer's disease (chronic i.c.v. application of Aβ, BSO and ROS)
- Parkinson's disease (6-hydroxydopamine)
- Stress (CRH, mild stress)
- Lesion models (eg. NMDA excitotoxic lesions)
- Alzet osmotic pumps
- GMO models
- Custom animal model development and validation upon request

Locomotory/motor activity

- Rotador, Open-Field, Beam Walking
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Behavioral tasks with high cognitive demand

- Novel object recognition task
- Active allothetic place avoidance task

This task requires rats on a continuously rotating arena to actively avoid an unmarked punished segment. The shock sector is defined relative to the landmarks of the laboratory environment (room frame) and is always in the same position in the room. Successful performance in the task requires the rat to pay attention to the extramaze cues to assess its distance from the shock sector. A unique feature of this task is that the animal must ignore the irrelevant intramaze cues and focus its attention on extramaze cues for successful localization of the shock sector. In addition, rats have to solve a conflict between two discordant subsets of spatial stimuli (extramaze and intramaze cues).
  


Figure shows the path and entrances into shock sector in animal model of schizophrenia (A) and control rat (B) in active allothetic place avoidance task.

DNA diagnostics

 RT-PCR & microarrays

Bioanalysis

 HPLC-MS/MS, NMR

Schizophrenia, Parkinson,

 Alzheimer, Custom