Forced Swimming Test: New FST DUAL SENSOR

Presentation

The Forced Swimming Test (FST), also known as Porsolt Swimming Test or 'behavioral despair test', is a common behavioral test for the development and screening of antidepressant and anxiolytic drugs to identify new treatments and understand the biological mechanisms of current treatments.

Bioseb's Forced Swimming Test FST DUAL SENSOR has been designed for rats and mice thanks to the expert work of Dr. Denis DAVID (described in a publication in NEURON in 2009, 'Neurogenesis Dependent and Independent Effects of Fluoxetine in an Animal Model of Anxiety/Depression').

Operating principle:

What is the TYC algorithm of Bioseb's new Forced Swimming Test ?
• A new tool that gives the researcher total control when evaluating protocols.
• The researcher is the expert!
• The TYC is taught how to detect the 3 states: Resting/Floating, Swimming, and Climbing/Struggling

The scoring can be learned and then consistently applied with no variability and drift over time! The TYC algorithm is an optimization tool: with a single run manually evaluated by the researcher, one will train the software to use scored parameters, TYC will adjust scoring algorithms to follow the researcher's evaluation rules.
The system allows easy comparison of several approaches, useful in training students, and provides consistency across multiple studies.

Two types of behavior can be observed during the Porsolt Test using FST DUAL SENSOR:

1. Non-depressed rodents (rats or mice), even when unable to escape from the water-filled cylinders, will try to swim and struggle to escape the containers.
2. Depressed rodents will stop trying sooner than non-depressed rodents and start to float in the cylinders, showing behavioural despair.

The floating or immobility time during the forced swimming test is an accurate indication of the effects of anti-depressants and anxiolitics.

Supplied with

• A customized support frame that separates the four beakers, houses the interface and supports the HD camera
• Four graduated beakers for rats or mice, (30 cm diameter for rats, 17 cm diameter for mice; extras available upon request)
• An FST DUAL SENSOR software product with license
• User's manual