Sidra Medicine research establishes animal behavior pipeline for precision medicine

Doha: A team of researchers at Sidra Medicine have established an animal behavior pipeline to better understand the impact of odor-guided behavior on human diseases like Autism, Anorexia and other appetite related disorders. The pipeline is part of Sidra Medicine’s precision medicine program.

The research combined animal behavior quantification with artificial intelligence to generate the most comprehensive study of mouse olfactory behavior, and study how these animal odor-guided behaviors 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 behavioral quantification platform to better understand how animals respond to environmental odors. This would then open the pathway to see whether the molecular properties of these odorants can be used to predict animal behavior as measuring animal behavior is often used in pre-clinical animal models.”