Grad student Zhu-san published a new paper on a novel tool quantifying the mouse home cage activity.

Zhu-san, a grad student collaborated with Deepa and developed a new tool useful in neuroscience (published in eNeuro). This is stand-alone solution to measure the voluntary wheel running activity of mouse at home cage without additional appendages such as PC and interface board which might occupy the space in the animal facility. They implemented by making use of the small electric part called microcontroller which manages the data acquisition and storage. Since the mouse becomes active at night time and sleep at daytime as a nocturnal animal, it runs the running wheel actively at night. Such a voluntary wheel running activity is useful measure to quantify the rhythmicity of the daily activity and motivation, which could be affected under the pathological condition such as depression.

Zhu M, Kasaragod DK, Kikutani K, Taguchi K, Aizawa H. A novel microcontroller-based system for the wheel-running activity in mice. eNeuro. 2021 Sep 3:ENEURO.0260-21.2021. doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0260-21.2021. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34479979. [Pubmed]

Although the equipment to measure wheel running activity has been available commercially, they primarily requires the additional components such as PC and the interface board. Limited space in animal facilities can hamper long-term monitoring of running wheel activity outside of the home cage. Our tool which we call Wheel-Running Activity acQuisition system (WRAQ) address this by designing a novel design of the device using open source hardware and software for data acquisition and analysis, respectively. We showed that WRAQ effectively analyzed the behavior of mice under the septic shock or genetic manipulation of the neural circuit.

Progress of the medical sciences relies on the studies reported as a scientific article prevalent to the community. Since new study will be designed based on the preceding studies, reproducibility of the published results are critical for the advance of the field. Unfortunately, researchers sometimes come across the poor reproducibility of the published results by their hands. To address such a reproducibility crisis, open source is one of the effective strategy by allowing the other researchers to inspect how the studies were carried out. All the hardware and software used in this study is shared over github repository (https://github.com/neurobio-hiroshima/WRAQ). We hope that open source solution like ours contributes to address this issue.