Three Pillars of Automated Home-Cage Phenotyping of Mice: Novel Findings, Refinement, and Reproducibility Based on Literature and Experience

Animal models of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders require extensive behavioral phenotyping. Currently, this presents several caveats and the most important are: (i) rodents are nocturnal animals, but mostly tested during the light period; (ii) the conventional behavioral experiments take into consideration only a snapshot of a rich behavioral repertoire; and (iii) environmental factors, as well as experimenter influence, are often underestimated. Consequently, serious concerns have been expressed regarding the reproducibility of research findings on the one hand, and appropriate welfare of the animals (based on the principle of 3Rs—reduce, refine and replace) on the other hand. To address these problems and improve behavioral phenotyping in general, several solutions have been proposed and developed. Undisturbed, 24/7 home-cage monitoring (HCM) is gaining increased attention and popularity as demonstrating the potential to substitute or complement the conventional phenotyping methods by providing valuable data for identifying the behavioral patterns that may have been missed otherwise. In this review, we will briefly describe the different technologies used for HCM systems. Thereafter, based on our experience, we will focus on two systems, IntelliCage (NewBehavior AG and TSE-systems) and Digital Ventilated Cage (DVC(®), Tecniplast)—how they have been developed and applied during recent years. Additionally, we will touch upon the importance of the environmental/experimenter artifacts and propose alternative suggestions for performing phenotyping experiments based on the published evidence. We will discuss how the integration of telemetry systems for deriving certain physiological parameters can help to complement the description of the animal model to offer better translation to human studies. Ultimately, we will discuss how such HCM data can be statistically interpreted and analyzed.