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Tribune News Network
Doha
A team of researchers at Sidra Medicine has established an animal behaviour pipeline to better understand the impact of odour-guided behaviour on human diseases like autism, anorexia and other appetite related disorders.
The pipeline is part of Sidra Medicine’s precision medicine programme. The research combined animal behaviour quantification with artificial intelligence to generate the most comprehensive study of mouse olfactory behaviour and study how these animal odour-guided behaviours relate to human smell perception.
Dr Luis R. Saraiva, principal investigator (Associate Level) from the Human Genetics Department at Sidra Medicine, said: “Our aim was to develop a high-throughput behavioural quantification platform to better understand how animals respond to environmental odours. This would then open the pathway to see whether the molecular properties of these odorants can be used to predict animal behaviour as measuring animal behaviour is often used in pre-clinical animal models.”
“In addition, despite its important role in modelling human disease, big data analytical approaches to analyse behaviour have rarely been extended to pre-clinical animal models. We believe this methodology developed at Sidra Medicine would help us to better understand how genetic mutations in humans can affect the entire organism and lead to diseases, such as autism or appetite-related disorders,” added Dr Saraiva.
In collaboration with other US-based researchers from Arizona State University and Monell Chemical Senses Center, the researchers at Sidra Medicine compared mouse olfactory behaviours to human smell perception scores and found that both species share three fundamental properties. These included factors such as odour valence (i.e., attraction vs. repulsion) as the most important aspect of smell perception; that molecular properties of odour molecules can be used to predict both mouse and human smell perception; and that odour concentration can have a big impact on odour-guided behaviours.
The findings were recently published in the prestigious scientific journal ‘Current Biology’ in May 2021.
Dr Diogo Manoel, staff scientist from the Genetic Department at Sidra Medicine who was the first author of the study, said: “Using a combination of analytical methods including multivariate statistics and machine learning, we were able to dig deeper into the behavioural data.
“These analyses uncovered the most relevant features of the dataset, shedding light on the predictability of animal behaviour based on the physicochemical properties of the molecular stimulus. We also intend to include these tools as one of the phenotyping approaches of the functional genomics unit here, as an integrating part of our precision medicine endeavor.”
Dr Saraiva, who was also the lead author of the study, added: “Our study generated the most comprehensive atlas of mouse olfactory behaviours to date and provided unique and novel insights into how mouse olfactory behaviours relate to human smell perception. The experimental approach we developed for this study combines measuring animal behaviour with the predictive power of artificial intelligence.
“Our goal here is to exploit artificial intelligence to cut short the time needed for the repurposing of medical drugs for the treatment of neurological diseases, including autism, intellectual disability and ataxia.”
Doha
A team of researchers at Sidra Medicine has established an animal behaviour pipeline to better understand the impact of odour-guided behaviour on human diseases like autism, anorexia and other appetite related disorders.
The pipeline is part of Sidra Medicine’s precision medicine programme. The research combined animal behaviour quantification with artificial intelligence to generate the most comprehensive study of mouse olfactory behaviour and study how these animal odour-guided behaviours relate to human smell perception.
Dr Luis R. Saraiva, principal investigator (Associate Level) from the Human Genetics Department at Sidra Medicine, said: “Our aim was to develop a high-throughput behavioural quantification platform to better understand how animals respond to environmental odours. This would then open the pathway to see whether the molecular properties of these odorants can be used to predict animal behaviour as measuring animal behaviour is often used in pre-clinical animal models.”
“In addition, despite its important role in modelling human disease, big data analytical approaches to analyse behaviour have rarely been extended to pre-clinical animal models. We believe this methodology developed at Sidra Medicine would help us to better understand how genetic mutations in humans can affect the entire organism and lead to diseases, such as autism or appetite-related disorders,” added Dr Saraiva.
In collaboration with other US-based researchers from Arizona State University and Monell Chemical Senses Center, the researchers at Sidra Medicine compared mouse olfactory behaviours to human smell perception scores and found that both species share three fundamental properties. These included factors such as odour valence (i.e., attraction vs. repulsion) as the most important aspect of smell perception; that molecular properties of odour molecules can be used to predict both mouse and human smell perception; and that odour concentration can have a big impact on odour-guided behaviours.
The findings were recently published in the prestigious scientific journal ‘Current Biology’ in May 2021.
Dr Diogo Manoel, staff scientist from the Genetic Department at Sidra Medicine who was the first author of the study, said: “Using a combination of analytical methods including multivariate statistics and machine learning, we were able to dig deeper into the behavioural data.
“These analyses uncovered the most relevant features of the dataset, shedding light on the predictability of animal behaviour based on the physicochemical properties of the molecular stimulus. We also intend to include these tools as one of the phenotyping approaches of the functional genomics unit here, as an integrating part of our precision medicine endeavor.”
Dr Saraiva, who was also the lead author of the study, added: “Our study generated the most comprehensive atlas of mouse olfactory behaviours to date and provided unique and novel insights into how mouse olfactory behaviours relate to human smell perception. The experimental approach we developed for this study combines measuring animal behaviour with the predictive power of artificial intelligence.
“Our goal here is to exploit artificial intelligence to cut short the time needed for the repurposing of medical drugs for the treatment of neurological diseases, including autism, intellectual disability and ataxia.”
