NC4gate

Adam Lester and colleagues from the NC4 lab, led by Dr. Manu Madhav at the University of British Columbia, have developed NC4gate, a fully customizable gate system that can be used in behavioral experiments involving rodent mazes (T-maze, Y-maze, radial arm, etc.). Often, behavioral designs with mazes are divided into phases (such as restricting movement to particular arms). The experimenter must either observe the rodent’s behavior and manually implement transitions between phases, or purchase an automated maze system from commerical vendors. The former may result in an unintentional disruption to training, and the latter is often expensive. NC4gate provides a user-friendly solution so that experimenters can automate their maze designs in a cost-effective way. Full documentation exists for both the hardware and software that is necessary to build and deploy NC4gate in your own research. The system can control over 500 gates using a single PC interface and microcontroller, and the entire set up costs only ~$50 USD. 

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_026445