Immediate protein preference after protein restriction

Data files associated with "Dietary protein restriction in rats leads to a rapid within-session preference for protein" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2025.114882 In this experiment, rats were placed in operant chambers with access to two solutions from two different bottles. As rats drank from each sipper, licks were measured using contact lickometers. Data include behavioural timestamps representing the onset and the offset (in seconds) of each individual lick. Operant chambers were purchased from Med Associates and operated using Med-IV software. Full details of the experimental setup are present in the above publication. Custom code used to analyse data and make figures for the publication is available at https://github.com/mccutcheonlab/immediate-protein-pref There is one datafile per rat per session and the Excel file - metafile_ipp.xlsx - is needed to know metadata about each session including, importantly, what each bottle contained. Example code of how to use this to read in raw datafiles can be found in the Github repository. In addition, there is a file that contains food intake data - foodintake.csv - and two files including extracted information relating to lick microstructure - cluster_size_over_days.csv and clusters_over_days.csv. Any questions about the datafiles should be addressed to [e-mail].