Resources
Neural Circuits SOPs (coming soon)
Mouse Behavior SOPs (coming soon)
Animal Husbandry SOPs (coming soon)
Forms
New User Request (if you need to add another member of your lab/team to the Core)
Housing Request (Room 417)
Facility Information for Grant Applications & Publications
Facilities
The Neural Circuits and Behavior Core (NCBC) is located inside the Pappajohn Biomedical Discovery Building, adjacent to mouse barrier and non-barrier animal facilities. The NCB Core comprises over 2,500 square feet of space containing equipment for users to perform mouse behavior, imaging, and histology experiments.
Equipment
Behavioral equipment
The NCBC has a variety of off-the-shelf and custom behavioral equipment available, including sixteen Beam Break Activity Monitoring chambers (Columbus Instruments), Elevated Plus, Elevated Zero, Forced Swim, Light/Dark box, eight Open Field arenas, Tail Suspension, Active/Passive Avoidance and Escape (Med Associates), four Fear Conditioning boxes (CleverSys), Grip Strength, Rotarod (Ugo Basile), five Acoustic Startle/Paired Pulse Inhibition boxes (San Diego Instruments), four Three-chamber Social Choice arenas, Conditioned Place Preference, four Spatial Object Recognition arenas (Noldus), four Novel Object Recognition arenas (Noldus), Barnes Maze (San Diego Instruments), T-Maze (San Diego Instruments), Y-Maze (San Diego Instruments), ten mouse nose poke Operant Conditioning boxes (Lafayette Instruments), and four touchscreen mouse Operant Conditioning boxes (Lafayette Instruments). The NCBC has Noldus Ethovision, CleverSys FreezeScan, Matlab, and Python software available for behavior data analysis on a dedicated computer workstation.
Electrophysiology equipment
The NCBC has eight Wireless Mouse amplifier systems (Pinnacle) for telemetric monitoring of EEG and EMG signals.
Optogenetics equipment
The NCBC has four LED modules and a controller (Doric Lenses) for optogenetic stimulation.
Histology / Imaging equipment
The NCBC has a variety of histology and imaging equipment, including a Leica CM3025S Cryostat, Leica TCS SPE Confocal microscope, Neurophotometrics fiber photometry system, LaVision UltraMicroscope II Light Sheet Microscope, and Bruker Ultima In Vitro and Investigator In Vivo multiphoton microscopes with SpectraPhysics MaiTai HPDS TiSapphire lasers. The NCB Core has Bitplane Imaris, Fiji/ImageJ, Matlab, and Python software available for image data analysis on a dedicated workstation with Dual 8-Core Xeon processor, 512 GB RAM, 24 GB NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPU, and 4 TB SSD RAID 0 data storage.
Surgical equipment
The NCBC has two Kopf precision stereotaxes with Leica S4E dissection stereomicroscope, two isoflurane vaporizers/scavengers, two homeothermic monitoring systems, two WPI UMP3 microsyringe pumps, a Germinator 500 dry bead sterilizer, and a Somnosuite and peristaltic perfusion pump for transcardial perfusions.
Acknowledgement/Co-Authorship Policy
Please acknowledge the Core on all publications resulting from experiments conducted within the Core. This allows us to track use and provide data on utilization to the University and funding sources. The following boilerplate text, or similar, can be used:
"We acknowledge the personnel and instrumentation in the Neural Circuits and Behavior Core in the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, supported in part by the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust and UI Carver College of Medicine."
If the intellectual contribution of Core staff is substantial, please consider staff for co-authorship.