4 Port Nose Poke

“Operant behavioral tasks for animals have long been used to probe the function of multiple brain regions. 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 domains. 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. 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 in mice.”