Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed the SnackerTracker - a low-cost open-source home-cage monitoring system which measures the food intake and feeding behavior of laboratory mice. Recently published in Wellcome Open Research, Mueller et al. validate the SnackerTracker under a range of controlled benchtop and in vivo conditions, including with mice having disrupted circadian rhythms. The resulting data captured robust feeding patterns and revealed shorter-timescale (ultradian) rhythms in arrhythmic mice, demonstrating the system’s ability to reveal novel biological insights and support behavioural phenotyping in diverse experimental contexts.
SnackerTracker development and open-source provision benefits the research community in several ways. Feeding behavior is a common experimental readout in studies related to metabolism, neurology, sleep, and circadian biology, and the SnackerTracker provides a way to continuously and non-invasively monitor this in a home-cage environment. The system is an accessible alternative to commercial feeding monitors, lowering financial and technical obstacles that might otherwise limit the scope of behavioral studies. It also supports reproducibility by providing researchers with hardware schematics, build instructions, and analysis scripts for inspection, future adaptation, and implementation. Research groups may either build SnackerTrackers from scratch, or purchase an assembled device from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics for £250 (contact: optec_enquiries@physics.ox.ac.uk).
The device SnackerTracker was created by DPhil student Marissa Mueller in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics under the supervision of Professor Zoltan Molnar, Professor Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, and Professor Stuart Peirson. “We wanted to build a system that is accurate, adaptable, cost-effective, easy to use, and compatible with existing cage setups at Oxford and beyond,” said Marissa. “By making everything open-source—from hardware schematics to analysis scripts—we hope that others will adopt and improve upon this design according to future study-specific needs. This manuscript contributes to the growing toolbox of behavioural research methods and reduces implementation barriers for labs around the world who can benefit from this system.”