Large-scale Analysis of Sleep in Zebrafish

Creators: Lee, Daniel A.; Oikonomou, Grigorios; Prober, David A.

Abstract

Over the past decade, zebrafish have emerged as a powerful model for the study of vertebrate sleep and wake behaviors. Experimental evidence has demonstrated behavioral, anatomical, genetic, and pharmacological conservation of sleep between zebrafish and mammals, suggesting that discoveries in zebrafish can inform our understanding of mammalian sleep. Here, we describe a protocol for performing sleep behavioral experiments in larval zebrafish, using a high-throughput video tracking system. We explain how to set up a sleep behavioral experiment and provide guidelines on how to analyze the data. Using this protocol, a typical experiment can be completed in less than five days, and this method provides a scalable platform to perform genetic and pharmacological screens in a simple and cost-effective vertebrate model. By combining high-throughput behavioral assays with several advantageous features of zebrafish, this model system provides new opportunities to make discoveries that clarify the genetic and neurological mechanisms that regulate sleep.

Additional Information

© 2022 Lee et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). Published: Feb 05, 2022. This protocol builds upon methods developed by Jason Rihel, David Prober and Alexander Schier (Prober et al., 2006; Rihel et al., 2010b), which were subsequently updated based on experimental and analytical advances (Lee et al., 2017, 2019 and 2020; Oikonomou et al., 2019). This work was supported by grants from the NIH (DAL: K99NS097683, F32NS084769; GO: F32NS082010; DAP: R35NS122172, R01MH121601), a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant (DAL: 25392) and a Caltech BBE Postdoctoral Fellowship (DAL). The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Ethics: Animal husbandry and experiments involving zebrafish were performed in accordance with the California Institute of Technology Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) guidelines and by the Office of Laboratory Animal Resources at the California Institute of Technology (animal protocol 1580).

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