Automated mouse homecage two-bottle choice test

Meaghan Creed has developed a novel device for assessing preferences by mice among fluids in their homecages, i.e. two-bottle choice test. She shared the design on http://hackaday.io and contributed the summary of it below.

https://hackaday.io/project/158279-automated-mouse-homecage-two-bottle-choice-test

Often in behavioral neuroscience, we need to measure how often and how much a mouse will consume multiple liquids in their home cage. Examples include sucrose preference tasks in models of depression, or oral drug self-administration (ie. Morphine, opiates) in the context of addiction. Classically, two bottles are filled with liquids and volumes are manually recorded at a single time point. Here, we present a low-cost, two-sipper apparatus that mounts on the inside of a standard mouse cage. Interactions are detected using photointerrupters at the base of each sipper which are logged to an SD card using a standard Arduino. Sippers are constructed from 15 mL conical tubes which allows additional volumetric measurements, the rest of the holding apparatus is 3D printed, and the apparatus is constructed with parts from Arduino and Sparkfun. This automated approach allows for high temporal resolution collected over 24 hours, allowing measurements of patterns of intake in addition to volume measurements. Since we don’t need to manually weigh bottles we can do high-throughput studies, letting us run much larger cohorts.

This is designed such that each set of 2 sippers uses its own Arduino and SD card. With a bit of modification to the code one Arduino Uno can be programmed to log from 6 cages onto the same SD card. Arduino compatible boards with more GPIOs (like Arduino Mega) can log from up to 56 sippers on one Arduino.

This research tool was created by your colleagues. Please acknowledge the Principal Investigator, cite the article in which the tool was described, and include an RRID in the Materials and Methods of your future publications.  RRID:SCR_021457