January 2022
A newly published article in Current Biology demonstrates that sheep can be a powerful animal model for brain function that can bridge the translational gap between rodents and primates.
One of the authors of the article, Senior Research Associate in Neuroscience at the UNIC Medical School, Dr Nikolas Perentos said: We conducted proof-of-principle deep brain electrophysiological recording experiments using unrestrained sheep during behavioural testing. Recordings were conducted over a period of many months during which time the animals participated willingly in the experiments. These experiments demonstrate that sheep are excellent experimental animals to use for longitudinal studies requiring a large-brained mammal and/or large-scale recordings across distributed neuronal networks. Sheep could be used safely for studying not only neural encoding of decision-making and spatial-mapping in naturalistic environments outside the confines of the traditional laboratory but also the neural basis of both intra- and inter-species social interactions.