“Home Cage-based Phenotyping in Rodents: Innovation, Standardization, Reproducibility and Translational Improvement” is a Paper-Collection-page recently opened on Frontiers, a leading Open Science Web Platform. Frontiers’ journals are led and peer-reviewed by editorial boards of over 100,000 top researchers, covering more than 600 academic disciplines. The freely accessible research articles have received over 500 million views and downloads and 1 million citations.
The Research Topic is intended to show how behavioural test in the home cage can be conducted in comparison to classical behavioural test. Indeed, in the abstract it is underlined how ‘classical’ behavioural tests are very useful to assess the emotional state and cognitive function of mice, including anxiety and fear, both innate and learned but also are prone to bias/not ideal, as they rely on: (1) general short test duration, (2) require experimenter-based interference (coercion: transfer, handling, novelty) as unspecific stressors, and (3) do not always take in consideration the nocturnal activity that murine species naturally display.
One of the solution of the problems could be the home cage monitoring systems, as for example Tecniplast DVC® system.
The new Home Cage Monitoring technology allows certain behavioural test be freely performed in the home rack of the animal avoiding the unwanted stress factors e.g. to time constraints, new environment or not proper animal-care training and maintenance.
In this way, animals will participate to behavioural test removing any possible environmental stressor that may change their behaviour and its interpretation.
