Neuroscience Databases & mice-sized touchscreen tablets could change how we conduct science. What is big data? And how can it help us?

Alzheimer's disease is a devastating, progressive disorder that causes degeneration of neurons in the brain responsible for memory. Alzheimer's disease represents the most common cause of dementia and includes continuous decline in thinking, behavioral and social skills that disrupts a person's ability to function independently. In this episode, Dr. Daniel Palmer - Neuroscience Post Doctoral Fellow from Western University - joins us to discuss how MouseBytes - a repository for neuroscience behavioural data - and various touchscreen operant tasks used with rodent models can be used to enhance drug development and ultimately increase the odds of getting worthy therapeutics to market. This work has vast implications for not only alzheimer's disease, but also Parkinson's Disease and several other psychiatric disorders.

Manuscript: MouseBytes, an open-access high-throughput pipeline and database for rodent touchscreen-based cognitive assessment. Published in eLife. Open Access Article: https://elifesciences.org/articles/49630

Produced by Roger Hudson, PhDc

Directed by Dr. Mina Nashed, PhD

Visual Effects by Dr. Stephen Daniels, PhD

Audio Mixing by Dr. Paul Sheppard, PhD

Digital Marketing by Bryan Jenkins, PhDc

Theme music: MegaDisko by Navigator Black & the Indighost