Precise measurement of rodent drinking using CLiQR (Capacitive Lick Quantification in Rodents)

Abstract

Accurate quantification of rodent licking behavior is essential for studies of fluid intake, including investigations of alcohol use disorder and obesity. Lickometry systems vary widely in sensing modality, cost, scalability, and data resolution. Also, many available systems require specialized housing or store only binary lick/no lick data based on thresholding. Here, we present CLiQR (Capacitive Lick Quantification in Rodents), an open-source capacitive lickometry system designed for high-throughput recording of licking behavior in home-cage environments while preserving the full capacitance time series. The system uses MPR121 capacitive sensors connected to custom metal-tipped serological pipette sippers and a centralized desktop computer to record data from up to 24 mice concurrently, with capacity for two-bottle choice experiments. Validation experiments demonstrated that the capacitive signals reliably distinguish licking from non-licking interactions. Total lick counts showed a positive correlation with measured fluid consumption (R2 = 0.849, p < 0.0001), confirming that detected events provide a meaningful proxy for intake. All information necessary to reproduce the system is shared openly in this manuscript and online. By combining scalability, full-trace data acquisition, and low cost, CLiQR provides a flexible and extensible platform for high-throughput behavioral neuroscience experiments and enables retrospective improvement of lick-detection algorithms.