MouseBytes, an open-access high-throughput pipeline and database for rodent touchscreen-based cognitive assessment

TLDR

Open Science has improved research reproducibility, yet rodent cognitive studies lack tools for data sharing, though automated touchscreen tests offer standardized outputs that could facilitate dissemination. The authors present an integrated touchscreen testing system linked to the mousebytes.ca database and a web platform, aiming to enhance protocol sharing, data availability, and reproducibility of mouse cognitive studies. They integrated touchscreen cognitive testing with the mousebytes.ca database and a web platform to enable data sharing. They provide the largest age‑dependent cognitive dataset for Alzheimer’s mouse models, revealing affected domains across sexes and strains.

Abstract

Open Science has changed research by making data accessible and shareable, contributing to replicability to accelerate and disseminate knowledge. However, for rodent cognitive studies the availability of tools to share and disseminate data is scarce. Automated touchscreen-based tests enable systematic cognitive assessment with easily standardised outputs that can facilitate data dissemination. Here we present an integration of touchscreen cognitive testing with an open-access database public repository (mousebytes.ca), as well as a Web platform for knowledge dissemination (https://touchscreencognition.org). We complement these resources with the largest dataset of age-dependent high-level cognitive assessment of mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, expanding knowledge of affected cognitive domains from male and female mice of three strains. We envision that these new platforms will enhance sharing of protocols, data availability and transparency, allowing meta-analysis and reuse of mouse cognitive data to increase the replicability/reproducibility of datasets.