This focus issue of Lab Animal coincides with a tipping point in biomedical research. For the first time, the scale of the reproducibility and translatability crisis is widely understood beyond the small cadre of researchers who have been studying it and the pharmaceutical and biotech companies who have been living it. Here we argue that an emerging literature, including the...
The gut microbiota (GM) plays a critical role in human health and disease. Likewise, it is becoming increasingly evident that changes or disruptions to the GM can have significant effects on animal models and their expressed phenotypes, adding a complex and important variable into basic research and preclinical studies. In this article, we review some of the most common sources...
Laboratory animals experience a large amount of environmental stress. An animal's environment can include both physiological and social stressors that may require an animal to adapt to maintain allostatic balance. For example, thermal stress can lead to changes in behavior, reproduction and immune function, which has been detrimental to cancer modeling in mice. Chronic...
This review highlights selected effects of untreated pain and of widely used analgesics such as opioids, non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs and antipyretics, to illustrate the relevance of carefully planned, appropriate and controlled analgesia for greater reproducibility in animal experiments involving laboratory rodents.
Reproducibility of in vivo research using the mouse as a model organism depends on many factors, including experimental design, strain or stock, experimental protocols, and methods of data evaluation. Gross and histopathology are often the endpoints of such research and there is increasing concern about the accuracy and reproducibility of diagnoses in the literature. To reproduce...
The poor record of basic-to-clinical translation in recent decades has led to speculation that preclinical research is “irreproducible”, and this irreproducibility in turn has largely been attributed to deficiencies in reporting and statistical practices. There are, however, a number of other reasonable explanations of both poor translation and difficulties in one laboratory...
Group housing is highly important for social animals. However, it can also give rise to aggression, one of the most serious welfare concerns in laboratory mouse husbandry. Severe fighting can lead to pain, injury and even death. In addition, working with animals that are severely socially stressed, wounded or singly-housed as a result of aggression may compromise scientific...
Good animal welfare is linked to the quality of research data derived from laboratory animals, their validity as models of human disease, the number of animals required to reach statistical significance and the reproducibility of in vivo studies. Identifying new ways of understanding and improving animal welfare, and promoting these in the scientific community, is therefore a key...
There is a “village” of people impacting research reproducibility, such as funding panels, the IACUC and its support staff, institutional leaders, investigators, veterinarians, animal facilities, and professional journals. IACUCs can contribute to research reproducibility by ensuring that reviews of animal use requests, program self-assessments and post-approval monitoring...
Automation technologies are improving efficiency in the vivarium and helping institutions keep up with the growing number of mutant rodents in their colonies.