PhenoTyper home cage
Description
The PhenoTyper home cage contains, besides the PhenoTyper topunit, a food and drink station and a shelter to allow an animal to live inside the PhenoTyper home cage for days in a row. During its stay, spontaneous behaviors such as locomotor activity, place preference and shelter use are recorded on a continuous basis and analyzed with EthoVision XT’s video tracking technology.
The PhenoTyper home cage can be extended with additional sensors and stimuli, such as the Noldus pellet dispenser. At any preferred moment, the animal’s behavioral responses to experimentally-induced stimuli can be recorded. With EthoVision XT’s Trial & Hardware Control Module, the most refined and interactive protocols can be designed that include Boolean operators and randomization functions, to assess approach-avoidance behaviors or learned behaviors that reflect the neuropsychological domains of anxiety and cognition respectively.
For instance, the animal can be conditioned to enter and leave the shelter when the house light inside the PhenoTyper home cage is on, in order to obtain a reward. Such a test could start at pre-defined times during a given day and consists of 20 trials or for the duration of 15 minutes. The start of each trial is cued by the house light. If the animal then enters the shelter and leaves the shelter within a few seconds AND visits a zone where the pellet will be dropped within a few seconds after leaving the shelter, a pellet is released. After this, the house light goes off during an intertrial-interval (ITI) between 2 and 8 seconds, and the next trial starts. If, however, the animal fails to meet these conditions anywhere in the procedure, the house light is turned off for 5 seconds (time-out) and after an intertrial-interval (ITI) between 2 and 8 seconds the next trial starts.
Because the PhenoTyper home cage is also equipped with video equipment and EthoVision XT contains video tracking functionality, the protocols are not only limited to the activation of sensors and stimuli, but can actually include the animal’s behavior on basis of video tracking as well. For instance, a session can only start when the animal has moved a minimal amount of distance after the ambient light inside the facility has been turned off.
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 Product overview of PhenoTyper | |
 PhenoTyper detection |
Specifications
| Wall material | clear acrylic PMMA |
| Floor dimensions | model 3000: 30cm x 30cm (12” x 12”) |
| model 4500: 45cm x 45cm (18.5” x 18.5”) | |
| Shelter dimensions | small: 10cm x 10cm x 5 cm (3.9” x 3.9” x 1.9”) |
| large: 15cm x 15cm x 12 cm (5.9” x 5.9” x 4.7”) |
The core components of a PhenoTyper home cage system are listed in the table below: