Department of Biomedical Sciences, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G2W1, Canada.
Department of Biomedical Sciences, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G2W1, Canada
eNeuro. 2020 Jun 19;7(3). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0488-19.2020. Print 2020 May/Jun.
Catalepsy bar tests are widely used to measure the failure to correct an imposed posture resulting from muscular rigidity. Procedures for measuring catalepsy vary greatly in the published literature, but one commonly used test measures the time it takes for a rodent to remove one or both of its forelimbs from a bar. The following paper describes an affordable, adjustable, open-source bar test that automatically measures and logs the time it takes for a rat to remove itself from a bar. While commercially available automated bar tests are prohibitively expensive, requiring proprietary software and hardware to operate, the proposed apparatus runs on an Arduino-based microcontroller making it low-cost and customizable. This 3D-printed design costs less than 65 United States dollars to build and is simple to assemble and operate. The beam-break sensor design also eliminates many of the pitfalls of the "complete-the-circuit"-based approach to recording catalepsy. The paper further describes the successful validation of the design using adult male rats injected with different doses of haloperidol to demonstrate a dose-dependent cataleptic effect. This design provides a versatile, low-cost solution to standardizing and automating measurement of catalepsy in rodents.
僵住测试棒广泛用于测量因肌肉僵直而导致的无法纠正强制姿势的情况。在已发表的文献中，僵住测试的程序差异很大，但一种常用的测试方法是测量啮齿动物将一只或两只前肢从测试棒上移开所需的时间。本文描述了一种经济实惠、可调节、开源的测试棒，它可以自动测量并记录大鼠从测试棒上移开所需的时间。虽然市售的自动化测试棒非常昂贵，需要专用的软件和硬件才能运行，但所提出的设备基于 Arduino 微控制器运行，因此成本低廉且可定制。这种 3D 打印设计的建造成本不到 65 美元，易于组装和操作。梁断传感器设计还消除了基于“完成电路”的记录僵住方法的许多缺陷。本文进一步描述了使用不同剂量氟哌啶醇注射成年雄性大鼠来验证设计的成功，以证明剂量依赖性僵住效应。该设计为在啮齿动物中标准化和自动化僵住测试提供了一种通用且经济实惠的解决方案。
