Low-cost solution for rodent home-cage behaviour monitoring

Abstract

In the current research on measuring complex behaviours/phenotyping in rodents, most of the experimental design requires the experimenter to remove the animal from its home-cage environment and place it in an unfamiliar apparatus (novel environment). This interaction may influence behaviour, general well-being, and the metabolism of the animal, affecting the phenotypic outcome even if the data collection method is automated. Most of the commercially available solutions for home-cage monitoring are expensive and usually lack the flexibility to be incorporated with existing home-cages. Here we present a low-cost solution for monitoring home-cage behaviour of rodents that can be easily incorporated to practically any available rodent home-cage. To demonstrate the use of our system, we reliably predict the sleep/wake state of mice in their home-cage using only video. We validate these results using hippocampal local field potential (LFP) and electromyography (EMG) data. Our approach provides a low-cost flexible methodology for high-throughput studies of sleep, circadian rhythm and rodent behaviour with minimal experimenter interference.