An interesting new article produced by Nature Research Custom Media and Tecniplast, entitled “Tracking mouse behaviour reveals new disease clues,” shows how Automated monitoring of unstressed mice yields new insights and reproducible results and examines how data on animal activity collected by automated home cages offers new insights into brain disorders, neurological and neurodegenerative disease.
The article highlights how DVC® is starting to reach its potential and that researchers are able to monitor a variety of complex behaviours, yielding new insights and that DVC® is opening new doors to scientific discoveries.
The article underlines how the DVC® system enables researchers to detect activity patterns that can’t be detected by removing animals from their cages to observe them. Interviewed researchers perceived immediately how this improves the animals’ welfare, offers more reliable measurements of normal behaviour, and makes it easier to spot deviations that signal disease onset, progression, or recovery, maximizing animal welfare
Moreover the interviewed researchers, using of the latest DVC features, showed real interesting scientific results. Indeed, beyond these baseline measures of mouse movement, they used a growing selection of add-on features to collect more revealing data.
They were able to program lighting in cages, as opposed to entire rooms, thereby controlling what individual mice experience as night and day or track voluntary movement using cage wheels that count rotations or track how mice respond to altered eating and sleeping schedules and what affects their memory.
Soon they’ll be able to follow individual mice as they spontaneously explore and socialize. The article underline how researchers by using automated cages to observe enough mice, and a large enough variety of mice, could collaborate to build libraries of expected mouse behaviours, sorted by genetic strain, sex and age.
If you want to read the full article, this is the link
If you want to know more about the revolutionary DVC® system, do not hesitate to contact your Tecniplast representative.
