CLiQR (Capacitive Lick Quantification in Rodents) Supplemental

Description

This repository contains the supplemental materials for the manuscript "Precise measurement of rodent drinking using CLiQR (Capacitive Lick Quantification in Rodents)" (in preparation). Abstract Accurate quantification of rodent licking behavior is essential for studies of fluid intake, including investigations of alcohol use disorder and obesity. Lickometry systems vary widely in sensing modality, cost, scalability, and data resolution, and many available systems require specialized housing or store only binary lick/no lick data based on thresholding. Here, we present CLiQR (Capacitive Lick Quantification in Rodents), an open-source capacitive lickometry system designed for high-throughput recording of licking behavior in home-cage environments while preserving the full capacitance time series. The system uses MPR121 capacitive sensors connected to custom metal-tipped serological pipette sippers and a centralized desktop computer to record data from up to 24 mice of either sex concurrently, with capacity for two-bottle choice experiments. Validation experiments demonstrated that the capacitive signals reliably distinguish licking from non-licking interactions. Total lick counts showed a positive correlation with measured fluid consumption (R2 = 0.849, p < 0.0001), confirming that detected events provide a meaningful proxy for intake. All information necessary to reproduce the system is shared openly in this manuscript and online. By combining scalability, full-trace data acquisition, and low cost, CLiQR provides a flexible and extensible platform for high-throughput behavioral neuroscience experiments and enables retrospective improvement of lick-detection algorithms.

Steps to reproduce

The data included in this repository was gathered during the validation process of the CLiQR system. Data were gathered from 8 C57BL/6J mice starting at 18 weeks of age, with matched N between males and females. To reproduce the data, follow the assembly instructions for the system and the protocol for use. Both of these are included in the code repository at https://github.com/TimmeLab/CLiQR and also included in this repository.

Institutions

• University of Cincinnati

  Ohio, Cincinnati

Categories

Funders

• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism

  National Institutes of Health

  Maryland, Bethesda

  Grant ID: R00AA028265

Licence