ZAF, the first open source fully automated feeder for aquatic facilities
- Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, United States
Abstract
In the past few decades, aquatic animals have become popular model organisms in biology, spurring a growing need for establishing aquatic facilities. Zebrafish are widely studied and relatively easy to culture using commercial systems. However, a challenging aspect of maintaining aquatic facilities is animal feeding, which is both time- and resourceconsuming. We have developed an open-source fully automatic daily feeding system, Zebrafish Automatic Feeder (ZAF). ZAF is reliable, provides a standardized amount of food to every tank, is cost-efficient and easy to build. The advanced version, ZAF+, allows for the precise control of food distribution as a function of fish density per tank, and has a user-friendly interface. Both ZAF and ZAF+ are adaptable to any laboratory environment and facilitate the implementation of aquatic colonies. Here we provide all blueprints and instructions for building the mechanics, electronics, fluidics, as well as to setup the control software and its user-friendly graphical interface. Importantly, the design is modular and can be scaled to meet different user needs. Furthermore, our results show that ZAF and ZAF+ do not adversely affect zebrafish culture, enabling fully automatic feeding for any aquatic facility.
Data availability
We provide all instructions to build the hardware and all code for the software in the wiki:github.com/royerlab/ZAF
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (N/A)
- Loïc Alain Royer
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This research was done under a protocol reviewed and approved by the institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) of University of California San Francisco (UCSF).
Copyright
© 2021, Lange et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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ZAF, the first open source fully automated feeder for aquatic facilities
eLife 10:e74234.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74234
