Cargando…
Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice
For ethical and legal reasons it is necessary to assess the severity of procedures in animal experimentation. To estimate the degree of pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm, objective methods that provide gradebale parameters need to be tested and validated for various models. In this context,...
Autores principales: | , , , |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2021
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8570043/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34744621 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2021.760606 |
_version_ | 1784594763483185152 |
---|---|
author | Zentrich, Eva Talbot, Steven R. Bleich, André Häger, Christine |
author_facet | Zentrich, Eva Talbot, Steven R. Bleich, André Häger, Christine |
author_sort | Zentrich, Eva |
collection | PubMed |
description | For ethical and legal reasons it is necessary to assess the severity of procedures in animal experimentation. To estimate the degree of pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm, objective methods that provide gradebale parameters need to be tested and validated for various models. In this context, automated home-cage monitoring becomes more important as a contactless, objective, continuous and non-invasive method. The aim of this study was to examine a recently developed large scale automated home-cage monitoring system (Digital Ventilated Cage, DVC(®)) with regard to the applicability and added value for severity assessment in a frequently used acute colitis mouse model. Acute colitis was induced in female C57BL/6J mice by varying doses of DSS (1.5 and 2.5%), matched controls received water only (0%). Besides DVC(®) activity monitoring and nest scoring, model specific parameters like body weight, clinical colitis score, and intestinal histo-pathology were used. In a second approach, we questioned whether DVC(®) can be used to detect an influence of different handling methods on the behavior of mice. Therefore, we compared activity patterns of mice that underwent tunnel vs. tail handling for routine animal care procedures. In DSS treated mice, disease specific parameters confirmed induction of a graded colitis. In line with this, DVC(®) revealed reduced activity in these animals. Furthermore, the system displayed stress-related activity changes due to the restraining procedures necessary in DSS-treatment groups. However, no significant differences between tunnel vs. tail handling procedures were detected. For further analysis of the data, a binary classifier was applied to categorize two severity levels (burdened vs. not burdened) based on activity and body weight. In all DSS-treatment groups data points were allocated to the burdened level, in contrast to a handling group. The fraction of “burdened” animals reflected well the course of colitis development. In conclusion, automated home-cage monitoring by DVC(®) enabled severity assessment in a DSS-induced colitis model equally well as gold standard clinical parameters. In addition, it revealed changes in activity patterns due to routine handling procedures applied in experimental model work. This indicates that large scale home-cage monitoring can be integrated into routine severity assessment in biomedical research. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8570043 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-85700432021-11-06 Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice Zentrich, Eva Talbot, Steven R. Bleich, André Häger, Christine Front Neurosci Neuroscience For ethical and legal reasons it is necessary to assess the severity of procedures in animal experimentation. To estimate the degree of pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm, objective methods that provide gradebale parameters need to be tested and validated for various models. In this context, automated home-cage monitoring becomes more important as a contactless, objective, continuous and non-invasive method. The aim of this study was to examine a recently developed large scale automated home-cage monitoring system (Digital Ventilated Cage, DVC(®)) with regard to the applicability and added value for severity assessment in a frequently used acute colitis mouse model. Acute colitis was induced in female C57BL/6J mice by varying doses of DSS (1.5 and 2.5%), matched controls received water only (0%). Besides DVC(®) activity monitoring and nest scoring, model specific parameters like body weight, clinical colitis score, and intestinal histo-pathology were used. In a second approach, we questioned whether DVC(®) can be used to detect an influence of different handling methods on the behavior of mice. Therefore, we compared activity patterns of mice that underwent tunnel vs. tail handling for routine animal care procedures. In DSS treated mice, disease specific parameters confirmed induction of a graded colitis. In line with this, DVC(®) revealed reduced activity in these animals. Furthermore, the system displayed stress-related activity changes due to the restraining procedures necessary in DSS-treatment groups. However, no significant differences between tunnel vs. tail handling procedures were detected. For further analysis of the data, a binary classifier was applied to categorize two severity levels (burdened vs. not burdened) based on activity and body weight. In all DSS-treatment groups data points were allocated to the burdened level, in contrast to a handling group. The fraction of “burdened” animals reflected well the course of colitis development. In conclusion, automated home-cage monitoring by DVC(®) enabled severity assessment in a DSS-induced colitis model equally well as gold standard clinical parameters. In addition, it revealed changes in activity patterns due to routine handling procedures applied in experimental model work. This indicates that large scale home-cage monitoring can be integrated into routine severity assessment in biomedical research. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-10-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8570043/ /pubmed/34744621 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2021.760606 Text en Copyright © 2021 Zentrich, Talbot, Bleich and Häger. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Zentrich, Eva Talbot, Steven R. Bleich, André Häger, Christine Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice |
title | Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice |
title_full | Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice |
title_fullStr | Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice |
title_full_unstemmed | Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice |
title_short | Automated Home-Cage Monitoring During Acute Experimental Colitis in Mice |
title_sort | automated home-cage monitoring during acute experimental colitis in mice |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8570043/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34744621 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2021.760606 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT zentricheva automatedhomecagemonitoringduringacuteexperimentalcolitisinmice AT talbotstevenr automatedhomecagemonitoringduringacuteexperimentalcolitisinmice AT bleichandre automatedhomecagemonitoringduringacuteexperimentalcolitisinmice AT hagerchristine automatedhomecagemonitoringduringacuteexperimentalcolitisinmice |