Basic information

Investigator: prof. MUDr. Jiří Horáček, Ph.D.
Main recipient: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Co-recipient: Charles University
Research period: 1/5/2025 - 31/12/2028
Total budget: 11,150,000 CZK
NIMH budget: 7,172,000 CZK
Supported by: Czech Health Research Council (AZV ČR)

 

 

Annotation

Negative schizophrenia symptoms; namely blunted affect, avolition, social withdrawal and poverty of speech, are untreatable in 40% cases. No effective and causal medication has been discovered to date. The development of novel treatment is limited as current animal models do not allow modelling the negative schizophrenia symptoms specifically, interpretation of the observed behaviors is unclear and complicated. We propose a new model organism, Gnathonemus petersii (G. petersii) fish following our successful research revealing analogues of positive and cognitive schizophrenia symptoms in these fish (Langova et al., 2023). G. petersii fish allow to directly observe their complex communication consisting in social behavioral patterns and spontaneous and frequent production of electric organ discharges (EODs). It is known that changes in electric activity are related to behaviors such as the EOD synchronization between two fish in a friendly manner. We as the first team successfully separated EODs from two fish and assigning these EOD and EOD sequences to each individual fish from the group for the pairing of electric signals with the fish’s behavior. The aim of the project is to examine G. petersii fish as a model of negative schizophrenia symptoms in following steps. We will identify behavioral and electric patterns and their interlinks including the communication system. We will implement automatic analysis of behavioral patterns using the DeepLabCut software and unsupervised learning-based algorithm for separation of individual EODs including analysis of EODs in chosen time window for pairing with behaviors. In final, we will examine pharmacologicallyinduced changes of behavioral and electric patterns and their relationship using ketamine and antipsychotics, which our group has successfully applied for pharmacological modeling of schizophrenia in laboratory rodents, G. petersii fish and human volunteers (Bubeníková-Valešová et al., 2008; Páleníček et al., 2011).

We aim to identify specific behavioral and electric patterns and their interlinks including the communication system of G. petersii fish. We will implement automatic analysis using DeepLabCut software for behavioral patterns and unsupervised learning-based algorithm for separation of individual EODs including analysis of EODs in chosen time window. At final, we will examine changes of behavioral and electric pattern and their relationship in reaction to ketamine and their normalization by antipsychotics in glutamatergic model of schizophrenia based on G. petersii fish.