An Open-Source, Automated Home-Cage Sipper Device for Monitoring Liquid Ingestive Behavior in Rodents

Godynyuk, Elizabeth; Bluitt, Maya N.; Tooley, Jessica; Kravitz, Alexxai V.; Creed, Meaghan C.

doi:10.1523/eneuro.0292-19.2019

Cited by 38 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…The large majority of trials occurred in such bouts, with less than 10% of trials being classified as non-bout trials. On one hand, this structure is likely related to the natural circadian pattern of eating and drinking displayed by mice (Ho and Chin, 1988;Godynyuk et al, 2019) and the volume of water required to sate the animals thirst. However, there also appeared to be a more functional purpose of clustering trials into short bouts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impaired refinement of kinematic variability in Huntington disease mice on an automated home-cage forelimb motor task

Woodard

Sepers

Raymond

2021

Preprint

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The effective development of novel therapies in mouse models of neurological disorders relies on behavioural assessments that provide accurate read-outs of neuronal dysfunction and/or degeneration. We designed an automated behavioural testing system (‘PiPaw’) which integrates an operant lever-pulling task directly into the mouse home-cage. This task is accessible to group-housed mice 24-hours per day, enabling high-throughput longitudinal analysis of forelimb motor learning. Moreover, this design eliminates the need for exposure to novel environments and minimizes experimenter interaction, significantly reducing two of the largest stressors associated with animal behaviour. Mice improved their performance of this task over one week of testing by reducing inter-trial variability of reward-related kinematic parameters (pull amplitude or peak velocity). In addition, mice displayed short-term improvements in reward rate, and a concomitant decrease in movement variability, over the course of brief (<10 minutes) bouts of task engagement. We used this system to assess motor learning in mouse models of the inherited neurodegenerative disorder, Huntington disease (HD). Despite having no baseline differences in task performance, Q175-FDN HD mice were unable to modulate the variability of their movements in order to increase reward on either short or long timescales. Task training was associated with a decrease in the amplitude of spontaneous excitatory activity recorded from striatal medium spiny neurons in the hemisphere contralateral to the trained forelimb in wildtype mice; however, no such changes were observed in Q175-FDN mice. This behavioural screening platform should prove useful for preclinical drug trials towards improved treatments in HD and other neurological disorders.Significance StatementIn order to develop effective therapies for neurological disorders such as Huntington disease (HD), it’s important to be able to accurately and reliably assess the behaviour of mouse models of these conditions. Moreover, these behavioural assessments should provide an accurate readout of underlying neuronal dysfunction and/or degeneration. In this paper, we employed an automated behavioural testing system to assess motor learning in mice within their home-cage. Using this system, we were able to study motor abnormalities in HD mice with an unprecedented level of detail, and identified a specific behavioural deficit associated with an underlying impairment in striatal neuronal plasticity. These results validate the usefulness of this system for assessing behaviour in mouse models of HD and other neurological disorders.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impaired refinement of kinematic variability in Huntington disease mice on an automated home-cage forelimb motor task

Woodard

Sepers

Raymond

2021

Preprint

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“…Measurement of liquid consumption by laboratory animals is a common and important methodology in many areas of science. There are a variety of methods used to measure liquid consumption, including weighing bottles before and after a drinking session (Bagley et al, 2020;Thiele et al, 2014), lickometry (which involves a sensor that detects a contact between an animal and the drinking spout) (Bagley et al, 2020;Dole et al, 1983;Godynyuk et al, 2019;Raymond et al, 2018) and continuous measurement of weight (Barkley-Levenson & Crabbe, 2012) or volume (Frie & Khokhar, 2019) of the fluid being consumed. Choice of method is often predicated on multiple factors, including experimental design and the scalability, cost and feasibility of operating the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A system for continuous and automated measurement of mouse home-cage drinking with automated control of liquid access

Bagley

Jentsch

2021

Preprint

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Measurement of drinking behavior in laboratory animals is an often utilized method in many areas of scientific research, including the study of ingestive behaviors and addictions. We have designed a system that measures drinking by continuously tracking fluid-filled bottle weights with load cells and calculating change in fluid weight per drinking bout. The load cells serve both as a contact sensor that detects mouse-spout contact, as well as a monitor of fluid weight change per contact bout. The design described here fulfills several key criteria, including automated and continuous recording of drinking in the home-cage, automated control of liquid access, and inexpensive/reproducible fabrication. These features may allow researchers to generate high-resolution, detailed information on drinking behavior in high-throughput experimental designs. Here, we provide an overview of the design and present results from tests to validate the system. C57BL/6J mice were offered water and ethanol concurrently, using this system. Consumption weights were determined by the system and independently by conventional approaches. The results indicated a near-perfect correlation between the two methods, indicating the system returned valid consumption weights. This system functions as a valid drinking monitor that provides temporally precise data with a low cost design.

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“…These systems provide the combined benefits of increasing the throughput of experiments and volume of data that can be collected, while also decreasing experimenter interaction and animal stress. Open-source tools that enable the home-cage monitoring of feeding and drinking 16 , 17 , bodyweight 18 , 19 , activity levels 20 , 21 , and more complex learning tasks 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 have all been published in recent years. In one notable study, the authors developed a proprietary home-cage methodology to automatically dose group-housed mice with the synthetic nucleoside BrdU over several days 27 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

PiDose: an open-source system for accurate and automated oral drug administration to group-housed mice

Woodard

Nasrallah

Samiei

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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Drug treatment studies in laboratory mice typically employ manual administration methods such as injection or gavage, which can be time-consuming to perform over long periods and cause substantial stress in animals. These stress responses may mask or enhance treatment effects, increasing the risk of false positive or negative results and decreasing reliability. to address the lack of an automated method for drug treatment in group-housed mice, we have developed PiDose, a home-cage attached device that weighs individual animals and administers a daily dosage of drug solution based on each animal's bodyweight through their drinking water. Group housed mice are identified through the use of RFID tagging and receive both regular water and drug solution drops by licking at a spout within the PiDose module. This system allows animals to be treated over long periods (weeks to months) in a fully automated fashion, with high accuracy and minimal experimenter interaction. PiDose is low-cost and fully open-source and should prove useful for researchers in both translational and basic research. Biological research often involves treating experimental rodents with compounds over extended periods. A variety of routes of administration are used in these studies, with the goal to optimize delivery of the agent while reducing the potential for injury and procedure-associated stress. Parenteral administration via subcutaneous or intraperitoneal injection is often used due to the high bioavailability of injected drugs; however, repeated restraint and injection causes stress and puts the animal at risk of physical complications 1,2,3. These stress responses are particularly undesirable in behavioural studies, as chronic stress affects a variety of behaviours and may mask treatment affects and increase the risk of Type I/II errors 4,5. An alternative to injection is oral administration, which is often useful in a pre-clinical context as oral drug treatment is the most common and convenient route of administration in humans. Unfortunately, oral gavage presents the same problems as injection regarding treatment stress and the potential for injury 1,6. To avoid this, several studies have provided methods for the voluntary feeding of drugs to animals in a palatable form (e.g. sucrose water, peanut butter) 7,8,9,10. This avoids some of the side effects associated with injection and gavage, but is time-consuming for chronic experiments and involves extensive experimenter interaction, which in itself may be enough to increase animal stress 11. To circumvent the need for manual administration, other studies have mixed the drug with the animal's drinking water 12,13,14,15. However, this method typically estimates drug dosage based on the average bodyweight and water consumption for all mice in a cage. This relies on the assumption that mice are drinking an amount of water that is directly proportional to their bodyweight, for which there is not clear support. To avoid this caveat, animals can be single-housed, or double-housed with a divider....

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An Open-Source, Automated Home-Cage Sipper Device for Monitoring Liquid Ingestive Behavior in Rodents

Abstract: Visual Abstract

Cited by 38 publications

References 32 publications

Impaired refinement of kinematic variability in Huntington disease mice on an automated home-cage forelimb motor task

Impaired refinement of kinematic variability in Huntington disease mice on an automated home-cage forelimb motor task

A system for continuous and automated measurement of mouse home-cage drinking with automated control of liquid access

PiDose: an open-source system for accurate and automated oral drug administration to group-housed mice

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