ZebraBox

The ZebraBox is the first ever automated analysis chamber used for zebrafish monitoring in a non-intrusive manner.

This system provides high throughput behavioral analysis data with controlled experimental conditions. It is widely used in the drug discovery and pharmacology field to identify compounds that significantly alter behavior such as adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, GABA and other compounds. Since behavioral research with zebra fish is proliferating rapidly the behaviors themselves are still poorly understood, making the results of such studies difficult to interpret without an automated calculation.

Manually scoring locomotion or quantification of locomotor activity levels of embryos, larvae or adult fish would be extremely inaccurate due to human error as well as tremendously time consuming for researchers.

Like for humans, environmental factors such as lighting conditions or temperature can greatly influence fish behaviors. Fish would express different behaviors when exposed to external stimuli such as sound, vibration, light or dark phases and temperature variations. It is crucial to be in control of those parameters while experimenting, therefore since the Zebrabox can control these parameters it has been a major part of modern Zebrafish studies.

Zebra fish larval locomotor activity assay of transgenic fish embryos and individual larvae placed in a 96-well plate, monitored in a box and continuously illuminated by infrared lights, illuminated by white lights showed major similarities between fish circadian system and mammalian sleep/wake regulator for example.

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