The Home-Cage Automated Skilled Reaching Apparatus (HASRA)

Greg Silasi from the University of Ottowa has kindly shared the following about HASRA, a system for individualized training of group-housed mice in a single pellet reaching task.

‘We developed an automated apparatus and single pellet reach training paradigm for group housed mice within the home cage. This task allows individualized training progression and handedness of presentation for each mouse, minimizes stress induced by experimenter interaction, and enables experiments and data collection on a massive scale, previously impossible because of the demands of one-on-one behavioral testing. We demonstrate an optimized set of task parameters and the utility of this apparatus for assessing lesion-induced motor impairments. Herein, we provide an open-source, scalable, platform for training and assessing skilled reaching in mice with minimal need for experimenter handling that is equivalent to gold- standard, manual single pellet training paradigms.’

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_021492