Has anyone had any luck with the SR-Lab startle response system for rodents? I have not been able to find anyone who has gotten significant differences with this system. Our lab has run several cohorts of rats and mice for different experiments, but we have yet to see any differences in startle responses.
What are you using the Startle reflex for? The Startle response is worse than useless for detecting minor or moderate hearing losses because of recruitment, which occurs with cochlear deafness. Sounds that elicit this reflex are loud enough to stimulate damaged ears at the same dB levels as normal ears.
We're not using it for hearing but for startle response (movement) to a random unconditioned stimulus (108dB). The mice are habituated in the chamber for 10min and then exposed to 30 trials of 40ms stimuli @108dB with random intervals ranging from 3-30s.
There may not be significant differences in the startle responses of the animals if there are no significant differences in their cortical sensory gating,
May be due to no significant differences in sensory gating.
We have run various different animals where we would expect to see differences in sensory gating (PTSD paradigms, etc.). And we can see trends, but are wondering if we need to modify the stimuli and vary the dB rather having it set to only 108dB for all trials.
I have used this system for Pre-pulse Inhibition in mice and have seen significant effects in several strains.
We created a platform for acoustic startle and prepulse inhibtion assessment using a kitchen scale and a microcontroller (Platform for Acoustic STArtle; PASTA), and in our proof of concept study (the protocol can still be improved a lot) we've seen a robust effect regarding the PPI and even some differences regarding the amplitude of AS in STZ-icv rat model of sporadic Alzheimer's disease.
You can check out our PASTA platform here:
Preprint Repurposing a digital kitchen scale for neuroscience researc...
Best,
Jan
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