bioRxiv Science⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2025.07.24.666497

RTFED, an open-source versatile tool for home-cage monitoring of behaviour and fibre photometry recording in mice

Taghipourbibalan, H.·McCutcheon, J. E.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

BackgroundConventional approaches for studying feeding and reward-driven behaviours require frequent animal handling or relocation of animals to specialized chambers, inducing stress, confounding behavioural outcomes, and limiting continuous (24/7) data collection. In recent years, the Feeding Experimentation Device (FED3) has emerged as a major advance, offering programmable modes of operation, affordable costs, and flexibility for investigating a range of feeding and operant behaviours. However, certain limitations prevent researchers from fully harnessing the FED3s capabilities in a user-friendly manner. New methodHere, we present the Realtime and Remote FED3 (RTFED) developed for continuous and online home-cage monitoring of mice, video recording behaviours and fibre photometry recording. ResultsValidation experiments confirm RTFED integrates well with FED3 to log and transmit behavioural events in real-time. It also incorporates event-triggered video capture through USB cameras, providing additional observational depth. Moreover, RTFED handles TTL signals to the fibre photometry system allowing precise behaviour-neural synchronization. Comparison with existing methodsA key strength of RTFED is its easily customizable architecture, enabling researchers to tailor both software and hardware configurations to meet specific experimental objectives. This flexibility, together with features such as remote data logging and email notifications that allow timely adjustments and animal welfare monitoring based on behavioural observations, substantially reduces animal disturbance and researcher intervention and labour. ConclusionsBy offering a cost-effective and modifiable alternative to proprietary commercial solutions, RTFED broadens accessibility, heightens reproducibility, and deepens investigations into feeding and reward-driven behaviours in home-cage settings, ultimately improving the quality and translational relevance of behavioural research. HighlightsO_LIWe enhanced the utility of FED3 with a graphical user interface called RTFED C_LIO_LIRTFED allows real-time and remote monitoring of mouse feeding and operant behaviour C_LIO_LIIt sends notifications in case of device failures or when flagged behaviours happen C_LIO_LIIt records event-triggered videos of defined behaviour C_LIO_LIRTFED relays sub-millisecond TTL outputs for fiber photometry recording C_LI Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=108 SRC="FIGDIR/small/666497v2_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (34K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@49674eorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@11d4585org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@bf2db1org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@150f73d_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

Source connections

Explore related subjects

neurosciencePreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Taghipourbibalan, H., McCutcheon, J. E.. 2025-07-29. RTFED, an open-source versatile tool for home-cage monitoring of behaviour and fibre photometry recording in mice. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.07.24.666497

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Attention Across Scales: From Individual Variation to Social Hierarchies and Brain Networks in Semi-Free-Ranging Macaques

Attention is a fundamental brain function supporting perception, decision-making, and social behavior, and its dysfunction profoundly impairs daily life. It is both dynamic and stable, varying across observations and individuals, changing across the lifespan, and being shaped by social and environmental experience. Yet capturing this complexity remains a central challenge in neuroscience. Here, we integrated longitudinal behavioral assessments of semi-free-ranging macaques living in naturalistic social groups with resting-state fMRI. We quantified performance across days, ages, and social hierarchies and related it to intrinsic brain organization. Distinct attentional phenotypes emerged, including individuals with reduced attentional control. Performance followed an inverted-U lifespan trajectory, improving from childhood to adulthood before declining. Social status modulated attentional performance. Critically, nonlinear lifespan trajectories and associations with individual attentional differences were most clearly expressed in frontoparietal connectivity. Together, these findings reveal how sustained attention is organized across scales, providing a biological framework for its individual diversity, social modulation, and neural basis.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Decoding natural scenes from patterned optogenetic responses in mouse visual cortex

A central challenge in developing visual cortical prostheses is to determine how visual stimuli should be transformed into effective patterns of cortical stimulation. Although advances in stimulation technologies, including optogenetics, provide increasingly precise control over cortical activity, it remains unclear whether artificially evoked activity can reproduce the information content of naturally evoked visual representations. Here we establish a quantitative framework for evaluating visual encoding strategies by decoding cortical responses evoked by natural vision and patterned optogenetic stimulation. We developed a novel dual-modal paradigm in awake mice to bridge the gap between endogenous photostimulation and artificial network driving. By co-expressing the high-performance calcium indicator GCaMP6s and the red-shifted, ultra-sensitive opsin rsChRmine-oScarlet in the primary visual cortex (V1), we successfully translated dynamic natural movie frames into patterned, spatiotemporal optogenetic stimulation. Quantitative comparisons of macro-scale dynamics demonstrated that this patterned optogenetic injection evokes cortical states highly comparable and representationally aligned with those driven by actual visual photostimulation. To systematically evaluate the fidelity of these responses, we developed STAR, a deep learning model featuring spatial and temporal attention mechanisms, and successfully reconstructed the frames of natural movies from V1 signals under both experimental modalities. Collectively, our results demonstrate that complex sensory information can be both naturally encoded and synthetically injected into V1 circuits with high decoding fidelity. This work provides an empirical and computational proof-of-concept for intelligent, closed-loop biomimetic encoders, establishing a robust framework for next-generation cortical visual neuroprostheses and bidirectional brain-machine interfaces.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Why Is Spontaneous Blink Timing Informative? An Adaptive Scheduling Perspective

Spontaneous eye blinks have long been linked to cognitive processing, yet how task demands shape blink timing and its relationship to behavioral performance remains unclear. We examined spontaneous blink behavior in 576 adults performing two variants of the Continuous Performance Task (CPT). Blink occurrence and timing were most strongly modulated by the experimental condition in the more demanding CPT-AX task, whereas their association with response time was stronger in the CPT-X task, where more consistent blink timing predicted faster responses. This dissociation suggests that task structure changes not only blink behavior but also the behavioral relevance of blink timing. These findings are consistent with an adaptive scheduling account of spontaneous blinking and provide a conceptual framework for understanding when and why blink timing contains chronometric information about ongoing cognition.

neuroscience↗