ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > Test equipment designed specifically for ANY-maze > The Waterwheel Forced Swim Test Tank > Performing experiments with the Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank > Setting up a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test protocol

Setting up a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test protocol

Introduction

In this section. we are going to look at the steps involved in setting up a simple protocol for the Waterwheel Forced Swim Test. This can then be used as a basis for more specific protocols, depending on the requirements of your experiments.

As you may already know, protocols are fundamental to how ANY-maze works because it is the protocol which defines how an experiment will be performed. Even if you have never used ANY-maze before, you will probably get along fine just following though the steps in this section, but if you want to know more about protocols then a good place to start is this introductory tutorial on protocols.

Creating an experiment

Before you can do anything in ANY-maze, you need to open an experiment. In this respect, ANY-maze is similar to Microsoft Word, where you can't do anything until you open a document. So the first thing you need to do is to start ANY-maze and select New empty experiment from the list of protocols on the right side of the opening page.

On the other hand, if ANY-maze is already running, you should simply switch to the File page, select New experiment from the list on the left and then select New empty experiment from the list of protocols on the right.

Setting the protocol mode and adding a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank

Now that you have an experiment open, you need to set the protocol mode and then add a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank to the protocol.

The protocol mode defines which features of ANY-maze will be available; for example, in Waterwheel Forced Swim Test mode you don't need to video track the animals, so the features related to tracking will all be turned off.

Figure 1. You should use the Protocol mode list to select Waterwheel Forced Swim Test mode.

4.

Next, we need to add our Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank to the protocol. This will tell ANY-maze which tank (or tanks) we actually want to use. You can include up to 40 tanks in an experiment, but to keep things simple we'll just include one. So, you now need to click the Add item button and then select New Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank in the menu that appears - see figure 2.

Figure 2. The New Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank menu option opens a sub menu, from which you can choose the tank(s) to add to the protocol.

Figure 3. Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tanks are added to the protocol list.

By the way, this is how the entire protocol works - you add things using the Add item button, they get included in the protocol list and you can then select them and alter the settings in the settings pane.

Figure 4. The Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank settings pane.

The settings for a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank are automatically set to default values, and you probably won't need to change them.

Reviewing the Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank input protocol elements

Because ANY-maze already knows you are setting up a protocol for a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank (since that's the mode we put it into), then it will automatically have added various input elements to the protocol when we added the Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank. These elements are:

Figure 5. The Waterwheel Forced Swim Test inputs are automatically included in the protocol list.

You will usually not need to make any changes to these Input elements.

Setting up stages and specifying the test duration

Another element that is automatically included in a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test protocol is a Stage. This is because ANY-maze requires that all protocols always include at least one stage, and the Waterwheel Forced Swim Test is no exception.

A stage is simply a test (or a group of tests) that you perform on your animals. In many cases, an experiment will simply have one stage consisting of one test (for each animal) and that is the default setting for Waterwheel Forced Swim Test. Of course, you can change this if you wish. For example, you might have two stages in your experiment; in the first stage you test the animals without any treatment, while in the second stage you treat them and then test them again. In this case, you would simply need to add a second stage to the protocol.

To see the stage, select Stages > First stage in the protocol list; the Settings pane will then show the stage's settings, as in figure 6.

Figure 6. The default settings for the first stage in a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test protocol

Full details about stages can be found here, but suffice to say that it is in the stage's settings that you specify the duration of your tests. As can be seen in figure 6, ANY-maze does not include a default duration, so you will need to set this value before you can actually perform any tests - a duration of 6 minutes was used by Nomura et al. in the original study that described the Waterwheel Forced Swim Test. You could enter this by typing '6 min' into the Test duration field.

Throughout ANY-maze, times can be specified using units of 'ms' for milliseconds, 's' for seconds, 'min' or 'm' for minutes, 'h' for hours and 'd' for days. You can mix these units if you wish, for example '3h 30min', and you can use decimal points, for example '3.5h'.

Setting up fields to record additional information about your animals or tests

This step is optional

If you wish, you can set up 'fields' in your protocol to record additional information about your animals or tests. For example, you may be keen to differentiate between how male and female animals respond, in which case you will presumably want to record their Sex somewhere. Of course, you could just note this on a piece of paper, but instead you could set up a 'Sex' field and record the data within ANY-maze. Not only would this mean that all the data relating to the experiment would all be in one place, but you could also then use ANY-maze's analysis features to analyse the animals' sex - perhaps to check that there is no significant difference between male and female animals.

You can create any number of fields, and they can be used as either independent or dependent variables in analysis. Full details about fields and how to set them up can be found here.

Save the protocol

You may have noticed that other than adding the Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank (or tanks) to the protocol, the only other thing we had to add to the protocol was the duration of the tests. Nevertheless, you will typically add some fields, or alter the default settings a little, and this being the case you will usually want to save the protocol so you can use it again in other experiments. To do this, you need to click the Save protocol button in the ribbon bar.

What next?

In this topic, we created a simple Waterwheel Forced Swim Test protocol. Now that we have this set up, we are ready to move on to the next topic of this tutorial - Running tests in a Waterwheel Forced Swim Test tank

See also:

The topics listed below are general topics relating to ANY-maze, and may refer to features not available or not required with Waterwheel Forced Swim Test.

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ANY-maze help topic T1225