![]() With access to 24/7 behavioral data, researchers can monitor the rhythms of normal and diseased mice to gain clues to their health status. Programmable lighting like Tecniplast’s Leddy lets scientists control each mouse’s experience of night and day. Soon they’ll be able to follow individual mice as they spontaneously explore and socialize, using a system of tubes called the Interlink that connect cages and have antennae to track RFID-tagged mice, according to Ulfhake, who is collaborating with Tecniplast on this new feature. They can track how mice respond to altered eating and sleeping schedules and what affects their memory. They can use a tool like the DVC® to monitor spontaneous movement, or use cage wheels that count rotations to track voluntary movement- an often-used model for an active lifestyle in humans. They can now program lighting in cages, as opposed to entire rooms, thereby controlling what individual mice experience as night and day. This produces less data than a video system, which reduces the data storage space needed, and it collects a comparable amount of information, including how far a mouse has traveled, its average speed, and where in the cage it spends most of its time, says Guido Gottardo, DVC® Product Manager at Tecniplast.īeyond these baseline measures of mouse movement, today researchers can use a growing selection of add-on features to collect more revealing data. Unlike earlier systems with video cameras that produced so much data that they were difficult to scale, the DVC® uses a grid of 12 electromagnetic sensors underneath each cage that monitor mice round the clock. In response, Tecniplast, an Italian company that specializes in automated mouse cages, introduced the Digital Ventilated Cage (DVC®). This limitation in turn fueled demand for smaller, affordable and scalable automated cages. Researchers found that reduced activity signaled Autism Spectrum Disorder 1, that pups of nicotine-exposed mothers faced an increased risk of ADHD 2, and that social withdrawal was an early warning sign of neuropsychiatric disorders 3.īut as automated cages grew more sophisticated, they also grew bigger and more expensive, making it difficult to scale up and monitor scores of animals in large, statistically powerful studies. These measurements led to important discoveries on the links between disease and behavior. Others monitored movements with infrared beam-break set-ups akin to building security systems, or used video cameras to record their behaviors. Some used infrared sensors to detect when mice ate or drank. In response, several companies developed automated home-cage monitoring platforms. But as scientists developed more genetically modified mouse strains in the 1990s to model human diseases and brain disorders, they struggled to reproduce phenotyping studies, which discern how genetic changes in animals affect their physiology and behavior. ![]() “For reproducibility, whatever’s best for the animal is best for the science, too.”įor decades, lab mice were kept in shoebox-sized home cages, and then temporarily transferred to other cages for tests and behavioral observations. This improves the animals’ welfare, offers more reliable measurements of normal behavior, and makes it easier to spot deviations that signal disease onset, progression, or recovery, says Joanna Moore, an investigator and information officer for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), whose work is focused on maximizing animal welfare in the company’s medicine research. To overcome these problems, researchers are turning more to automated systems that monitor mice in their home cages, where they are least stressed. ![]() “Before, we had just glimpses of their behaviors,” Ulfhake says. Irreproducible results also made it difficult to investigate long-term behavior patterns, such as changes in sleep-wake cycles. “We have this reproducibility problem when it comes to animal behaviors,” says Ulfhake, a senior professor of laboratory medicine at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute. This stress alters behavior in unpredictable ways, which has often made it impossible to tell whether an animal’s altered behavior was due to a disease, drug or other intervention, or to frazzled nerves. Lab mice scare easily when they’re handled and moved, especially during the day when mice, naturally nocturnal creatures, would normally be resting. Until this trove became available, researchers had a hard time obtaining reliable data on how animals scamper, sleep, eat, and otherwise act naturally. Credit: Anthony Bradshaw / Getty Imagesīrun Ulfhake spent decades studying aging in mice before he discovered a treasure trove of new data, one that many researchers overlook. Monitoring the social behavior of mice can reveal genetic links to disease and early signs of neuropsychiatric disorders.
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