The French press: a repeatable and high-throughput approach to exercising zebrafish (Danio rerio)

Takuji Usui; Daniel W A Noble; Rose E O'Dea; Melissa L Fangmeier; Malgorzata Lagisz; Daniel Hesselson; Shinichi Nakagawa

doi:10.7717/peerj.4292

The French press: a repeatable and high-throughput approach to exercising zebrafish (Danio rerio)

PeerJ. 2018 Jan 17:6:e4292. doi: 10.7717/peerj.4292. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Takuji Usui^{1

2}, Daniel W A Noble^{1

2}, Rose E O'Dea^{1

2}, Melissa L Fangmeier^{1

2}, Malgorzata Lagisz¹, Daniel Hesselson^{2

3}, Shinichi Nakagawa^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Evolution & Ecology Research Centre and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
² Diabetes and Metabolism Division, Garvan Institue of Medical Research, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
³ St. Vincent's Clinical School, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Abstract

Zebrafish are increasingly used as a vertebrate model organism for various traits including swimming performance, obesity and metabolism, necessitating high-throughput protocols to generate standardized phenotypic information. Here, we propose a novel and cost-effective method for exercising zebrafish, using a coffee plunger and magnetic stirrer. To demonstrate the use of this method, we conducted a pilot experiment to show that this simple system provides repeatable estimates of maximal swim performance (intra-class correlation [ICC] = 0.34-0.41) and observe that exercise training of zebrafish on this system significantly increases their maximum swimming speed. We propose this high-throughput and reproducible system as an alternative to traditional linear chamber systems for exercising zebrafish and similarly sized fishes.

Keywords: Burst swimming; Circular; Endurance test; Sustained swimming; Technique.

Grants and funding

Shinichi Nakagawa is supported by Future Fellowship (FT130100268) and a start-up fund from UNSW. Daniel W.A. Noble was supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE150101774) and a UNSW VC Research Fellowship. Daniel Hesselson was supported by NHMRC Project Grants (GNT1063981 and GNT1130222). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.