Zebrafish Tail Coil

The Zebrafish Tail Coil assay measures the spontaneous coiling movements of zebrafish embryos, an early indicator of neuromuscular development. The assay is designed to run on a 96 well plate: it records a short video of the embryos and scores their movement over the recording using the Activity Metric, reported in arbitrary units (a.u.).

During acquisition the MCAM captures the full field of view at a configurable frame rate and duration, optionally after a start delay, and divides each frame into per-well images when well plate keypoints are provided. Frame-to-frame pixel changes are thresholded to distinguish real embryo movement from noise, and the resulting per-well activity is written out alongside a plot of activity over time. Video can be saved to MP4, to CSV (activity data only, no frames), or held in RAM.