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Design and construction of a low-cost nose poke system for rodents.
Journal article

Design and construction of a low-cost nose poke system for rodents.

  • Rizzi G Biozentrum, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 50/70, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.
  • Lodge ME Biozentrum, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 50/70, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.
  • Tan KR Biozentrum, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 50/70, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.
  • 2016-05-26
Published in:
  • MethodsX. - 2016
Arduino based nose poke system for rodents
Lowcost
Nose poke
Operant behavior
Optogenetics
Reward
Rodent
English Operant behavioral tasks for animals have long been used to probe the function of multiple brain regions (i.e., understanding the role of dopamine in electrical brain stimulation reward [1], or determining the rewarding properties of feeding oriented brain pathways [2]). The recent development of tools and techniques has opened the door to refine the answer to these same questions with a much higher degree of specificity and accuracy, both in biological and spatial-temporal terms [3], [4]. A variety of systems designed to test operant behavior are now commercially available, but have prohibitive costs. Here, we provide a low-cost alternative to a nose poke system for mice. Adapting a freely available sketch for ARDUINO boards, in combination with an in-house built PVC box and inexpensive electronic material we constructed a four-port nose poke system that detects and counts port entries. To verify the applicability and validity of our system we tested the behavior of DAT-CRE transgenic mice injected with an adeno-associated virus to express ChannelRhodopsin 2 in the Ventral tegmental area (VTA) and used the BNC output to drive a blue laser coupled to a fiber implanted above the VTA. Over 6 days, mice perform as it has been reported previously [5] exhibiting a remarkable preference for the port that triggers optogenetic stimulation of VTA dopamine neurons. •We provide a low cost alternative to commercially available nose poke system.•Our custom made apparatus is open source and TTL compatible.•We validate our system with optogenetic self-stimulation of dopamine neurons.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/93324
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