'Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM Press)'
Abstract
Prepulse inhibition (PPI) and habituation of acoustic startle reflex have been extensively used to assess deficits in the
sensorimotor functions of human patients and animal models of schizophrenia. These assays require expensive and
sophisticated experimental setup for fine control of acoustic stimuli and sound attenuation. In this study, we investigate
whether startle habituation assay based on mechanical (tap) stimuli can induce similar impairment in the habituation
response in the schizophrenia model of larval zebrafish. For this purpose, a custom startle apparatus consisting of a
9 V push and pull solenoid and an Arduino Uno microcontroller was used to generate tap stimuli at desired intervals.
Our results showed that tap stimuli at 1 Hz effectively evoked startle response in the control fishes which habituated
after a few trials. The habituation response was significantly impaired in the MK801-induced schizophrenia model,
similar to that elicited by acoustic startle stimuli in a previous study. We propose this simple and inexpensive method
as an alternative tool for studying information processing and attention deficits in the pharmacological model of
schizophrenia in zebrafish
