Stuff I tried during grad school/post-doc that won't get published but could be useful

[achamess]

Behavior assay
Here is something I tried a while back and talked about here. I’d love to develop a more objective assay for mechanical pain where the mouse reports on its aversion/preference without having to evoke some kind of response that needs to be scored (I’m looking at you Von Frey)

Real-time place preference/aversion apparatus: a proposal/idea

Like everyone else who does preclinical pain research, I’m always trying to think about better, more objective, more predictive, and higher throughput assays for assessing mouse nociceptive behavior. While the problems with our bread-and-butter assays (von Frey, Hargreaves, acetone drop, hot plate, etc.) are recognized by all, the reason these assays predominate still is because the alternatives are not much better. Operant assays such as conditioned place preference/aversion have been used in…