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Johannes Bohacek was nominated as one of the finalists for this year’s ALEA awards. We congratulate all the nominees and the winners, the co-lead duo Olga Schubert and Martin Ackermann!

Our recent work published in Nature Methods is featured in an article on the ETH Zurich News platform: “Behavioural analysis in mice: more precise results despite fewer animals”.

Our paper “Analysis of behavioral flow resolves latent phenotypes” has been published in Nature Methods. It introduces BehaviorFlow, a pipeline for analyzing rodent behavior from video recordings. BehaviorFlow yields more power for group comparisons, it can reveal hidden treatment effects, and it allows for the comparison of complex behavioral patterns across experiments.

Our study “Tonic and burst-like locus coeruleus stimulation distinctly shift network activity across the cortical hierarchy” has been published in Nature Neuroscience. By combining optogenetics with functional brain imaging, we find that during moderate tonic locus coeruleus activation in mice, noradrenaline release engages cortical regions related to associative processing. In contrast, burst-like stimulation biases the brain toward sensory processing.

ETH Zurich launches the 3R Hub to establish methods that improve animal experiments. Affiliated with the lab of Prof. Johannes Bohacek, the hub focuses on the 3Rs – the three foundational principles of animal experimentation to which the ETH is committed: Replace, Reduce and Refine. The 3R Hub raises awareness among researchers and the public about compassionate animal research, and provides hands-on solutions for labs interested in establishing 3R-related methods.