"What’s wrong with my mouse” is a must-read for each person in the field of neuroscience working with mice and standard behavioural equipment. Since then, advancements in phenotyping have brought to the latest and most advanced solutions of monitoring animals undisturbed, 24/7 in their “real” home cage through the Digital Ventilated Cages (DVC®).
With such technologies, researchers from Charles River, in collaboration with CNR in Rome and the University of Naples Federico II, were able to phenotypically characterize inbred and outbred mouse strains by analyzing the spontaneous locomotor activity of inbred and outbred mouse strains with the most advanced metrics used in chronobiology. The results showed clear differences in the circadian activity of the selected strains that were further confirmed by an unsupervised machine learning approach.
This paper represents a milestone for unbiased, unstressed and reproducible research, leading to better outcomes and ensuring welfare for the animals.
