Yang Wenbin, Meng Yutong, Li Danyang, Wen Quan
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Hefei, China.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2019 Jan 24;13:4. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00004. eCollection 2019.
The larval zebrafish is a promising vertebrate model organism to study neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory due to its small brain and rich behavioral repertoire. Here, we report on a high-throughput operant conditioning system for zebrafish larvae, which can simultaneously train 12 fish to associate a visual conditioned pattern with electroshocks. We find that the learning responses can be enhanced by the visual contrast, not the spatial features of the conditioned patterns, highlighted by several behavioral metrics. By further characterizing the learning curves as well as memory extinction, we demonstrate that the percentage of learners and the memory length increase as the conditioned pattern becomes darker. Finally, little difference in operant learning responses was found between AB wild-type fish and transgenic fish.
由于其脑容量小且行为丰富，斑马鱼幼体是研究学习和记忆背后神经机制的一种很有前景的脊椎动物模式生物。在此，我们报告一种用于斑马鱼幼体的高通量操作性条件反射系统，该系统可同时训练12条鱼将视觉条件模式与电击联系起来。我们发现，通过几种行为指标突出显示，学习反应可通过视觉对比度而非条件模式的空间特征得到增强。通过进一步描述学习曲线以及记忆消退情况，我们证明，随着条件模式变得更暗，学习者的百分比和记忆长度会增加。最后，我们发现AB野生型鱼和转基因鱼在操作性学习反应方面几乎没有差异。
