Abstract
Widely available low-cost electronics encourage the development of open-source tools for neuroscientific research. In recent years, many neuroscientists recognized the open science movement for its potential to stimulate and encourage science that is less focused on money, and more on robustness, validity, questioning and understanding. Here, we wanted to contribute to this global community by creating a research platform based on a common digital kitchen scale. This everyday ordinary kitchen tool is sometimes used in neuroscience research in various ways; however, its use is limited by sampling rate and inability to store and analyze data. To tackle this problem we developed a Platform for Auditory STArtle or PASTA. This robust and simple platform enables users to obtain data from kitchen scale load cells at a high sampling rate, store it and analyze it. Here, we used it to analyze acoustic startle and prepulse inhibition sensorimotor gating in rats treated intracerebroventricularly with streptozotocin, but the system can be easily modified and upgraded for other purposes. In accordance with open science principles, we shared complete hardware design with instructions. Furthermore, we also disclose our software codes written for PASTA data acquisition (C++, Arduino) and acoustic startle experimental protocol (Python) and analysis (R-based Awesome Toolbox for PASTA, ratPASTA R package). To further encourage the development of our PASTA platform we demonstrate its sensitivity by using PASTA-gathered data to extract breathing patterns during rat freezing behavior in our experimental protocol.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We added ORCID for Ana Knezovic. We also included updated version of the Fritzing schematic and changed generic HX711 load cell amplifier into SparkFun HX711 Load Cell Amplifier. We thank Sasha Reschechtko from the University of Western Ontario for the suggestions. We also added a zipped up KiCad project as an additional supplement to make the whole thing easier to follow.
