Design Plans for an Inexpensive Tail Flick Analgesia Meter

While the pedagogical benefits of incorporating inquiry driven labs into an undergraduate curriculum are well established, often the prohibitive costs of providing equipment for such labs limits the types of experiences that can be offered. For example, the lab portion of Advanced Neuroscience at Centenary College of Louisiana consists of a semester-long research project developed by the students. Frequently, these junior- and senior-level students generate interesting research questions that must be culled or scaled back simply due to a lack of appropriate equipment. In the most recent iteration of the class, the students wanted to examine analgesia using the tail flick test, a measure of spinal nociception. In this test a rodent subject is restrained; its tail is exposed to a heat source; and the latency to flick its tail away from the noxious stimuli is recorded. As commercial devices were far beyond the lab budget, we sought to develop an inexpensive tail flick analgesia meter that was easy to use and generated reliable data. The prototype device was tested by students in the above-mentioned class and was found to consistently produce reliable data in agreement with the literature. Here we present plans for a tail flick analgesia meter that can be constructed for $50–75, roughly 100 times cheaper than commercial devices.