AniWellTracker: Image Analysis of Small Animal Locomotion in Multiwell Plates

Abstract

Animal movement is one of the important phenotypes in animal research. A large number of small animals can be tested in high-throughput studies using multiwell plates to study the effects of different genes, chemicals, and the external environment on animal locomotion. In this paper, we propose AniWellTracker, which is a free image analysis software optimized for analyzing individual animal locomotion using multiwell plates. In the tracking mode, the center coordinates of individual animals are calculated by analyzing images. In the review mode, not only the animal’s movement path, but also its speed, distance traveled, location frequency, rotation angle, etc. are analyzed and visualized using the built-in chart function. To test the usefulness of AniWellTracker, a case study was conducted to investigate the effect of two household cleaning agents on the swimming speed of zebrafish. AniWellTracker, written in Visual Basic .NET, is a standalone graphical user-interface software that does not use commercial software or external image analysis libraries and is expected to be of significant help to researchers.