Fig. 1

A schematic overview of the system used for assessing wheel-running behaviour in rodents. a A schematic overview of the system set-up. The system using LabVIEW system design software (National Instruments). A laptop computer (IBM ThinkPad) with a National Instruments A/D board (NI DAC-Card 6024E, 200 kSamples/s, 16 channels), a breakout box (National Instruments BNC), and a high speed IEEE 1394a port was used to run in-house software to collect raw position data (see b). Additional details are shown in Additional file 1: Figure S1. b Examples of wheel-running data. Cumulative position (or distance), velocity, and acceleration can all be derived from the raw position trace (top to bottom). The velocity trace represents dx/dt, and the acceleration trace represents dv/dt. Direction (i.e. clockwise or counter-clockwise) is noted in the accumulated position trace and reflected as “+” and “−” velocities in the velocity trace. See text for details