Project Summary Advances in neuroscience depend on reliable tools and technologies, including the ability to carry out functional in vivo studies. BFNL was created within the Stanford Neuroscience Research Center to develop and centralize vital behavioral, translational, and neuropharmacological resources and their dissemination to a broader research community. Financial support from Stanford University and School of Medicine in the amount of 5 MM start-up budget helped with the establishment of BFNL at its inception in 2007. BFNL is strategically equipped with resources to provide critical support to the broadest range of research projects and to provide contracted services and techniques to Stanford and national laboratories. BFNL provides experimental access to tools to determine the brain function in health and disease. These experimental tools are available to scientists who may not otherwise have access to these resources and expertise as the cost of resources necessary to run and analyze behavioral studies is substantial. BFNL is a centralized resource for standard and automated behavioral paradigms, state-of-the-art phenotyping services for novel transgenic lines, and expertise in the validated rodent CNS Disease Models for testing novel neuropharmacology in translational studies. BFNL is a unique and validated translational neuroscience resource that is available to the Stanford community as well as interested researchers across the country with a documented history of support for 200 laboratories and more than 40 publications. Under this proposal, we will add the following instrumentation to our portfolio of equipment: 240 Digilab-Digital Ventilated Cages, 40 Metabolic cages with E-Chiller, 8+4 FreezeFrame Fear Conditioning System, 4 Place Preference System, 4 Avoidance System, 8 Self-Administration System, 8 Microdialysis and Syringe Pump System, and 8 Open Field Activity System. BFNL’s well-established and documented expertise to maintain and run animal behavioral and pharmacological equipment makes it well-positioned to obtain, distribute, facilitate, and disseminate usage of the requested equipment to the Neuroscience community both at Stanford and beyond in a unique way that ensures widespread usage that will lead to massive success and acceleration of translational studies. In the past 13 years, BFNL has supported numerous Stanford laboratories with their CNS disease and translational needs, leading to therapeutic development and clinical translation. BFNL has been instrumental in supporting innovations coming from extraordinary laboratories such as Südhof, Shatz, Barres, and Deisseroth, who have been recognized with the prestigious Nobel, Keio, and NAS prizes. Many other laboratories at Stanford have also benefited from BFNL’s services and expertise both at Stanford and across the country. To continue supporting and advancing NIH-funded neuroscience research, BFNL must continue to provide state-of-the-art technologies. This application requests funding for nine pieces of equipment to be placed in BFNL. The requested equipment will support a specialized workflow for rodent behavioral and neuropharmacological testing and complement the already existing core facility equipment.

Project Narrative Our ability to study the nervous system during development, aging, how it changes through learning, or during disease progression is fundamentally enhanced, in part, through our ability to carry out functional and behavioral validation in the whole animal. The Behavioral and Functional Neuroscience Laboratory (BFNL), one of four core facilities that constitute the Stanford Neurosciences Research Center, is a shared resource platform for academic labs, providing access to rodent behavioral testing in existing and novel paradigms for characterizing cognition and behavior and expertise in rodent models of CNS disorders through efficacy studies. The BFNL platform has proven to be extremely valuable to the Stanford and national research community, and the requested instrumentation will further support BFNL’s specialized workflow for rodent behavioral and neuropharmacological testing and enhance NIH-funded animal research.