Establishment and Application of Zebrafish Auditory Evoked Potential(AEP) Detection System / 听力学及言语疾病杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To establish an auditory evoked potential (AEP) detection system in zerbafish.Methods The AEP detection tank was designed and made, and then verified for its quality and reliability via four experiments anesthesia experiment, swim bladder deflation, noise exposure and goldfish AEP test.Finally, zebrafish (total length form 10 mm to 46 mm) were determined using this system for AEP.Zebrafish randomly were divided into five groups according to total length (TL=12~15 mm, n=6;TL=17~20 mm,n=4;TL=22~26 mm, n=4;TL=32~37 mm, n=9;and TL=42~46 mm,n=12).Goldfish, as control group, were purchased for local petshop (TL=38~54 mm,n=8).Results The results of these four verifying experiments confirmed the biological, rather than artefactual, nature of the responses represented by the recorded waveforms.The AEPs were detected up to a much higher frequency limit (12 kHz) than previously reported.In this study, all fish demonstrated a range of hearing frequency from 100 Hz to 12 kHz without frequency expansion during development.The best hearing was observed at 600 Hz~1 kHz.The mean values of the frequency-averaged thresholds (mean SEM) were 141.7±1.32, 124.8±1.31, 121.8±1.49, 117.8 ±1.09 and 124.4±1.87 dB w, respectively, for the 5 TL groups.The AEP thresholds demonstrated both developmental improvement and age-related loss of hearing sensitivity.Conclusion An auditory evoked potential detection system of zerbafish has been established with stable performance and can be used for AEP detection of zebrafish.