The Novel Tank Test: Handling Stress and the Context Specific Psychopharmacology of Anxiety

摘要

Background. The zebrafish has become a popular animal model for behavioral pharmacology. One of the greatest advantages of the zebrafish is its amenability for high throughput screens to identify anxiety altering compounds. The novel tank diving test is arguably one of the most commonly utilized behavioral tests for quantifying anxiety-like behavioral responses in zebrafish. However, a number of context-dependent anxiety-like behavioral responses have recently been reported in the literature for this task, and the validity of using a single measure, the diving response, has been questioned.