An Automated Experimentation System for the Touch-Response Quantification of Zebrafish Larvae

Abstract

Touch-response experimentation in zebrafish helps researchers better understand the link between genetics, drug effects, and behaviors. However, commonly manually conducted experimentation cannot fulfill a high-throughput screening and often delivers low accuracy and lacks reproducibility. Thus, the main aim of this work is to establish a fully automated robot-assisted experimentation system with minimal human participation to conduct the touch-response experimentation with freely swimming zebrafish larvae. Our designed system is able to undertake the role of repeated touch-response experiments at predefined specific location of the larvae in different ages and under different conditions, with high accuracy, robustness, and repeatability, and can also get comparable experimental results. The errors of the detection methods are less than 3 pixels and the offset errors of the touching points are less than 5%. Designed for high-efficiency experimentation, this system will promisingly release a great amount of the burden for the biological operators from touch-response experiments and may also have potential applications in other organisms for touch-evoked response analysis. Note to Practitioners—This article presented an automated touch-response experimentation system on zebrafish larvae, which can release a huge burden of the biological operators by achieving accurate, efficient, and repeated touch-response experiments. Manually conducted experiments are time-consuming and has low accuracy as well as difficult to do the quantification of the behaviors of the larvae. Our proposed system introduced an automated experiment pipeline and can also generate the behavior quantification of the larvae automatically, as the verification experiments confirmed. Basically, the research on the behaviors of zebrafish larvae requires large-scale data collection and analysis, so our system will play a vital role in such cases. Besides, the system can also be potentially used in other organisms, such as medaka larvae, and other related research, such as drug effects. In the current system, only one single larva was considered in each separate experiment, so our future work will be to achieve the experiments with multiple larvae in large scale for more high-throughput readouts and knowledge discovery.