ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > Test equipment designed specifically for ANY-maze > The Repeated Acquisition and Performance Chamber (RAPC) > Setting up an ANY-maze protocol for RAPC

Setting up an ANY-maze protocol for RAPC

Introduction

In this section. we are going to look at the steps involved in setting up a simple protocol for RAPC (the Repeated Acquisition and Performance Chamber). 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 RAPC to it

Now that you have an experiment open, you need to set the protocol mode and then add a RAPC to the protocol.

The protocol mode defines which features of ANY-maze will be available; for example, in RAPC 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 RAPC mode.

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Next, we need to add our RAPC box to the protocol. This will tell ANY-maze which box (or boxes) we actually want to use. You can include up to 40 RAPC boxes 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 RAPC in the menu that appears - see figure 2.

Figure 2. The New RAPC menu option opens a sub menu, from which you can choose the box(es) to add to the protocol.

Figure 3. RAPCs 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 RAPC settings pane.

The settings for a RAPC are automatically set to default values, and you probably won't need to change them.

Reviewing the RAPC I/O protocol elements

Because ANY-maze already knows you are setting up a protocol for a RAPC (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 RAPC box. These elements are:

Figure 5. The RAPC I/O elements are automatically included in the protocol list.

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

Setting up stages and specifying the test duration

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

A stage is simply a test (or a group of tests) that you perform on your animals. In RAPC experiments you will usually test the animal multiple times, perhaps first performing a series of training trials, and then treating the animal and performing a single probe trial. In this case you would have two stages, 'Training' and 'Probe', with Training consisting of perhaps 6 trials and Probe consisting of one.  For more information about stages see An introduction to stages.

The stage that will automatically be included in the protocol is called 'First stage' and it has just a single trial - see figure 6. Obviously you can edit this stage to suit your experiment, and add more stages if required.

Figure 6. The default settings for the first stage in a RAPC 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. The duration is the maximum time the animal will have to complete the task, note that the test will end automatically when the animal reaches the 'reward' compartment, so although you might specify a duration of, perhaps, 4 minutes, a test might last just 30 seconds if the animal traverses the box quickly.

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'.

Save the protocol

You may have noticed that other than adding the RAPC box (or boxes) 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 more stages, 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 RAPC protocol. Now that we have this set up, we are ready to move on to the next topic of this tutorial - Performing experiments and analysing results for RAPC

See also:

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

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ANY-maze help topic T1242