Topic: scratching

Acute itch has a clear beneficial purpose, directing our attention and physical response to specific areas of the skin to remove potentially harmful substances and parasites through scratching. However, millions suffer from persistent itch, where excessive scratching instead leads to skin injuries and sleep deprivation. Itch-inducing substances are detected by primary afferents in the skin, which relay the information to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord for further processing. Subsequently, ascending pathways transmit this information to the brain making us aware of the itch. Spinal glyciner

Behavior analysis typically relies on trial-based repetitions of constrained tasks. We aimed to uncover how age, pain, and itch influence the patterns of behavioral sequences and their transitions in freely behaving animals using MoSeq, a machine learning network analysis tool developed by the Datta lab. Mice of different ages were treated with chloroquine (itch) or formalin (pain) and placed in an open field arena and recorded for 30 minutes via a high-speed color camera and infrared depth camera. A trained autoregressive hidden Markov model classified the mouse movements into sub-second syll