Next Generation ALPHA Zebrafish Tank Washer: High Throughput with Reduced Environmental Impact

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Zebrafish is a premier research organism for the genetic analysis of vertebrate development and modeling human birth defects and disease. The Zebrafish Facility at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is a shared-used facility. This 5,644 sf state-of-the-art facility accommodates a total of nearly 9,000 tanks in four animal holding rooms with independent recirculating water systems. The Facility provides optimal conditions for the rearing and maintenance of up to 200,000 fish. Starting with four zebrafish laboratories in 2011, the Facility currently supports research of 33 independent laboratories. Presently, over 100 graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows and scientists carry out research in the Facility that is supported by R00, R01, R54, and P01 grants from the National Institutes of Health. The Facility also supports other educational and outreach programs. The Facility enables these programs by ensuring superior husbandry with automatic feeding that halves the time zebrafish grow to adulthood; supplying wild-type lines and embryos for experimentation, cryopreserving sperm to minimize the number of lines maintained as life stocks, conducting pathological testing; maintaining Quarantine System for imported lines, providing research services such as genome engineering, and washing and disinfecting holding and breeding tanks and their components to ensure safe and efficient research operations. The continued increase of the zebrafish users and expansion to 9,000 tanks requires modern, technologically advanced equipment to clean and disinfect, on a daily basis, hundreds of holding and breeding tanks, and tank components as well as fish nets to ensure safe and efficient zebrafish research. Here we propose replacing the existing 900 GP Walk in Washer (Tecniplast) with the next generation ALPHA Walk in Washer model (Tecniplast). The existing 900 GP Washer is a prototype aquatics washer with several limitations: it uses steam lines to heat water, is energetically inefficient, requires long wash cycles, uses an external chemical dosing system, and breaks down frequently. These inefficiencies and frequent downtimes increase manual labor, limiting and slowing down the Facility operations and research activities it supports. The ALPHA model deploys adaptive cleaning technology that combines independent vertical and oscillating movements allowing for superior water coverage. The ALPHA washer uses electricity to heat water, shorter wash cycles and thus higher throughput that would meet the continually growing washing needs of the zebrafish researchers. The reservoir for the chemicals used during wash cycles fit into the machine footprint. Operations with the ALPHA Washer would reduce environmental impact with a shorter wash cycle and consuming smaller amounts of chemicals per cycle. The proposed upgrade to the modern ALPHA Walk in Washer would dramatically improve the washing capacity of zebrafish holding and breeding tanks; would meet the needs of the growing zebrafish research operations and would also reduce the Facility’s environmental impact.