DBscorer

The forced swim test (FST) and tail suspension test (TST) are highly validated measures of depressive-like behavior in rodents that have both been used for decades to screen for antidepressant drugs. They have also found use in evaluating the non-motor symptoms of movement disorders. Manual scoring of these tasks requires significant training, is time intensive, and still results in person-to-person variability that is difficult to reproduce. To date, no open source method of automating these protocols has existed, demanding expensive commercial solutions that are prohibitively expensive and generally more complicated as they are not task specific. Thus, Arnab Nandi and colleagues have created DBscorer, an open source, MATLAB-based software for FST and TST video analysis. DBscorer provides an intuitive GUI for running your experiments such that those with no programming experience can operate the software without difficulty. The video analysis is also robust, offering analysis  of  additional  parameters and visualization of behavioral despair across time. DBscorer thus provides an unbiased, automated method for intuitive, high throughput measures of depressive-like behavior in rodents.

This research tool was created by your colleagues. Please acknowledge the Principal Investigator, cite the article in which the tool was described, and include an RRID in the Materials and Methods of your future publications.  RRID:SCR_022334