3-Minute 3Rs September 2018

Welcome to the September episode of 3-Minute 3Rs, brought to you by Lab Animal (www.nature.com/laban), the NC3Rs (www.nc3rs.org.uk) & the North American 3Rs Collaborative (www.na3rsc.org)Here are the papers behind the pod:1. Assessing animal affect: an automated and self-initiated judgment bias task based on natural investigative behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30571-x2. Comparison of serial blood collection by facial vein and retrobulbar methods in C57BL/6 mice. https://doi.org/10.30802/AALAS-JAALAS-17-0001343. Can grimace scales estimate the pain status in horses and mice? A statistical approach to identify a classifier. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200339Transcript:[LA]...Your valence, that is, whether you’re feeling positive or negative, can influence your judgment. There’s evidence that animals are no different, and how an animal responds to an ambiguous cue could a way to gauge their affective state and refine their welfare. But testing for judgment biases can be time consuming for the people involved. In August, researchers at the University of Bristol published an automated judgment bias test involving a natural rat behavior in the journal Scientific Reports. They developed a set up to train rats without human intervention to associate one audio tone with a food reward and another with an unpleasant puff of air. The rats have to nose poke into a food trough to start a trial, and either leave their nose in place or withdraw it according to what they hear. How they respond to ambiguous tones should reflect their valence. The cues still need a bit more work, but rats are at least up to the challenge of learning such an automated judgment bias task that could potential be used for future welfare research. [NA3RsC] Serial blood collection in mice is often necessary for sentinel testing and for tracking experimental processes. In July, Jennifer Frohlich and her colleagues published a study in JAALAS that could help refine the process of recurring blood draws in mice. The study, Comparison of Serial Blood Collection by Facial Vein and Retrobulbar Methods, performed single and serial blood draws for both methods. The single facial vein group experienced the least clinical signs after blood collection and the least histological lesions. The single and serial retrobulbar groups both had a similar amount of harderian adenitis and ocular trauma on histology. Meanwhile, the serial facial vein group had a 33% mortality rate, the most clinical signs post-collection which included seizures, head tilt, and convulsions; and 2 mice had histologic brain lesions consistent with trauma. The researchers concluded that the facial vein method is less desirable for serial blood collection in mice compared with the retrobulbar method.[NC3Rs] Effective, accurate pain assessment is key to safeguarding the welfare of any animal. And one such approach growing in use among animal researchers are grimace scales. Using this methods, individuals observe specific expressions associated with pain in a particular species and score them collectively for their intensity. The higher the score, the greater the pain the animal is perceived to be in. Of course, it is vital to validate that any method of pain assessment is effective and reliable. In her paper published this August in PLoS One, Dr. Emanuela Dalla Costa, from the University of Milan, has done just this. In her study, Dr. Dalla Costa collected over 1000 grimace scores from individual observations of horses and mice, pre- and post-surgery. Their data was subjected to exhaustive statistical analysis to determine how the level of pain the animal was experiencing, and the variation in the different observers used, influenced the overall pain score the animals received. The analysis identified both mouse and horse grimace scales to a high level of consistency across each of the individual users, demonstrating these scales to be a reliable method of assessing pain... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.