An efficient new assay for measuring zebrafish anxiety: tall tanks that better characterize between-individual differences
| Autor: | Shinichi Nakagawa, Daniel Hesselson, Malgorzata Lagisz, Susanne Zajitschek, Hamza Anwer, Daniel W. A. Noble, Dominic Mason, Margaret J. Morris |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Male
0301 basic medicine animal diseases Individuality BF Anxiety 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine bepress|Life Sciences fluids and secretions bepress|Life Sciences|Research Methods in Life Sciences|Animal Experimentation and Research Statistics medicine Animals Zebrafish Reliability (statistics) QL bepress|Life Sciences|Research Methods in Life Sciences Behavior Animal General Neuroscience fungi technology industry and agriculture Reproducibility of Results food and beverages Repeatability 030104 developmental biology Behavioral data RC0321 Environmental science Female medicine.symptom 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| ISSN: | 0165-0270 |
| Popis: | Background Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are increasingly being used to model anxiety. A common behavioral assay employed for assessing anxiety-like behaviors in zebrafish is the “novel tank test”. We hypothesized that using deeper tanks in this test would result in greater between-individual variation in behavioral responses and a more ‘repeatable’ assay. New methods After mapping the literature and identifying common behavioral parameters used in analysis, we performed novel tank anxiety tests in both custom-designed ‘tall’ tanks with increased depth and ‘short’ trapezoidal tanks. We compared the repeatability of the behavioral parameters between tall and short tanks and also investigated sex differences. Results Overall, regardless of tank depth, almost all behavioral parameters associated with anxiety in zebrafish were significantly repeatable (R = 0.24 to 0.60). Importantly, our tall tanks better captured between-individual differences, resulting in higher repeatability estimates (average repeatability tall tanks: R = 0.46; average repeatability short tanks: R = 0.36) and clearer sex differences. Conclusions Our assay using tall tanks has advantages over tests based on short tanks which underestimate repeatability. We argue that use of deeper tanks will improve the reliability of behavioral data across studies using novel tank tests for zebrafish. Our results also call for increased attention in designing the most appropriate assay in biomedical and behavioral sciences as current methods may lack the sensitivity to detect subtle, yet important, information, such as between-individual variation, an important component in assessing the reliability of behavioral data. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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