Abstract
The quantitative measurement of water flow-induced swimming of fish species using a swimmill is a powerful method to evaluate motor ability of individual fish. Zebrafish is a commonly used vertebrate that enables the study of morphological, physiological and behavioral characteristics associated with genes. We here established a reproducible method that allows to measure the body length and the critical swimming speed of adult zebrafish using a swimmill.
Keywords: Motor, Speed, Swimmill, Swimming, Zebrafish
Background
To evaluate motor ability of fish, swimmill systems have been used for measurement of critical swimming speed (Ucrit), which is the maximum water velocity in which fish can keep swimming. Many different swimmill equipments and protocols have been used for zebrafish studies (Table 1) and thus, it was difficult to compare results of different experiments and different protocols due to the lack of detailed calibration methods and protocols. We applied commercially available swimmill equipment Swim Tunnel Respirometer, which is the major and standard one among zebrafish researchers, established a reproducible protocol for obtaining basic swimming characteristics of adult zebrafish, such as adequate water temperature and adequate length of caudal fin among various wild-type strains (Wakamatsu et al., 2019). We here describe the detailed methods to monitor dissolved oxygen for the estimation of oxygen consumption in swimming, to measure body size of adult zebrafish, to conduct calibration of water velocity, to acclimate zebrafish to the narrow swimming chamber and to measure swimming speed. This protocol would be useful for researchers who use swimmill. Table 1. Swimmill equipments. The absolute value of Ucrit measured in adult wild-type zebrafish (3-12 months old) appears to vary by the difference of the swimmill equipments. This is probably due to the size difference of swimming chamber that generates uneven water flow between center and peripheral. Therefore, the comparison of Ucrit should be done in the assays that use the same equipment.
Materials and Reagents
Equipment
Software
Procedure
Data analysis
Notes
We could obtain reproducible results using this protocol (Wakamatsu et al., 2019).
Acknowledgments
We thank Hirata Lab members for helpful comments. This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research B (16H04657, 19H03329) and Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (17H05578) from the MEXT, Japan, the Naito Foundation and the Japan Epilepsy Research Foundation.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Ethics
All animal experiments described in this manuscript and guidelines for use of zebrafish have been approved by Animal Care and Use Committee at Aoyama Gakuin University (A9: valid until March 2021).
References
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