Motory Coordination, Grip Strength, Activity


Rodent Treadmill NG with interchangeable lane assembly for rats or mice

Ugo Basile introduces an original TREADMILL for rats and mice. The same device is suitable for tests on either rats or mice, by simply replacing the lane assembly.

Features / Specifications

SAME DEVICE TO TEST RATS & MICE
SLOPE: positive (uphill) or negative (downhill), from -25 to +25°, in 5° steps
SHOCK: from 0 to 2mA (in 0.1mA steps), included
CONTROLS: 4”3 touch-screen to set and monitor the test




Applications:

“Exercise is a multifactorial activity that affects virtually every organ and tissue in the body. Not only does exercise contribute many health benefits, but lack of exercise is im-plicated in many chronic health problems.

As evidence continues to accumulate concerning the impressive range of health benefits that exercise confers, biomedical researchers have increasingly become interested in conducting systematic studies of exercise to further define those benefits”.

Fatigue is a common and frequently poorly-understood symptom in many diseases and disorders. New preclinical assays of fatigue may help to improve current understanding of fatigue-like behavior in rodents and many other exercise paradigms and study future treatment of fatigue.

Treadmills are rolling belts (tapis-roulants) with presettable speed and adjustable uphill and downhill inclination (slope), enabling forced exercise training and accurate testing of fatigue in lab animals.

“Treadmill running has been used extensively over the past decades to study behavioral, physiological, biochemical, and, more recently, molecular responses to both acute exer-cise stress and chronic exercise training. Although investigators have used a wide variety of species (…) for treadmill running studies, they have used rodents in most of these studies.

Treadmill running has the distinct advantage over other forms of exercise, including spontaneous wheel running and swimming, that the total amount of external work done by the rat can be easily calculated.

Treadmill running may be construed as a form of forced exercise in which the animal does not have a choice of participating in the activity. Because of this, noxious stimuli (e.g., electric shock and bursts of high-pressure air) may be needed to motivate the animals to exercise”


The 1st, original Rat RotaRod for motory coordination studies

The Rota-Rod is the reference test to screen drugs potentially active, or having side effects, on motor coordination.

Features / Specifications


Speed adjustable in the range
3-80 RPM, in steps of 1 RPM                 
Constant speed, ramp (accelerat­ing), multi-step ramp (NEW!)
New trip boxes
Embedded USB memory stick
Brand new Software

Applications


The “Rota-Rod” technique has been originated by a 1957 paper of N.W. Dunham and T.S. Miya (see paragraph 9.1-Method Papers) and has proved to be of great value in research involving screening of drugs which are potentially active on motor co-ordination.
Ugo Basile designed the first industrial RotaRod in the 1960s. The name we coined soon became so popular, now everybody knows this instrument as RotaRod! The Rota-Rod is the reference test to screen drugs potentially active, or having side effects, on motor coordination.
When a rat falls off its cylinder section onto the trip-box below, the plate boxes and the corresponding magnetic switch is activated, thereby recording the animal endurance time in seconds.
The display shows the actual angular speed (RPM). At the end of a run, the display shows for each animal the running time, the rotation mode and the rotation speed at the time the animal fell off, combined with information preset by the user.


GSM Grip-Strength Meter for mice and rats

Grip-Strength Meter automatically measures grip-strength (i.e. peak force and time resistance) of forelimbs and - via the optional grid - hindlimbs in rats and mice. The effects of drugs, toxins, muscle relaxants, disease, ageing or neural damage on muscle strength may be assessed.


Features / Specifications


Force-Rate monitoring tools (software and LCD display)
Automatic Peak Detector
5 grasping tools included: bar, trapeze, plastic grid (metal grid is optional) 
Auto-Zeroing routine at every measurement


Application


When pulled by the tail, rodents instinctively grab anything they can, to try to stop this involuntary backward movement, until the pulling force overcomes their grip strength. when positioned in front of the GSM bar, or trapeze, or grid, the animal grasps at it.
After the animal loses its grip on the grasping bar, the peak amplifier automatically records and stores the peak pull-force achieved by the limbs and shows it on the display.

Activity Cage for recording of spontaneous coordinate activity in Rats and Mice

Activity Cage has proved to be of great value to record spontaneous co-ordinate activity in rats and mice (individual or groups) and variation of this activity in time.

Features / Specifications


IR photocells arrays of adjustable height
2 pairs of IR photocells arrays
Embedded printer, memory and software

Application


Activity Cages are useful to record spontaneous coordinate activity in rats and mice (individual or groups) and variations of this ac-tivity in time, e.g., in the following types of investigations:
General toxicology, in ascertaining the action of a drug on the animal’s activi-ty, especially if it is subjected to chronic treatment
Psycopharmacology, in screening drugs which are potentially active on the central nervous system
Behavioral Sciences, in evaluating the variations of spontaneous activity after changes in environmental conditions.