Taming anxiety and variation in laboratory mice

This project aims to establish easily-implemented, practical approaches to reduce the anxiety and stress responses that have been shown to occur in laboratory mice during routine handling, restraint and scientific procedures. Refining these procedures will improve the welfare of laboratory mice throughout their lives. It may also reduce data variability and the confounding effects of stress responses in experiments, helping to reduce the number of animals used and increase the reliability of comparisons between experiments and laboratories.

Routine handling and restraint of laboratory animals has profound - but variable - effects on anxiety, stress physiology and underlying neurochemistry. Recently, we have shown remarkably strong differences in anxiety, aversion and behavioural variation in response to alternative methods for routine handling of laboratory mice. The aim of this studentship will be to extend our initial studies to establish practical approaches that can easily be implemented to reduce anxiety and stress responses of laboratory mice to routine handling, restraint and mild procedures. This has the capacity to substantially improve the lifetime experience of mice used in research. The student will also explore whether such approaches reduce variation in experiments that are likely to be influenced by stress and anxiety responses, and will increase reproducibility between experimenters. This has the potential to reduce the numbers of animals needed for research.