Housing and testing of laboratory animals often occurs in minimalistic settings geared at the reductionist approach. However, such conditions differ greatly from those in the wild. Recent evidence shows that this can lead to a narrower range of variance in behaviours, and consequently less relevant brain readouts. Housing and testing animals in an environment that is more similar to natural conditions, bears the potential to advance the applicability and translatability of animal research.
In this DC project, we aim to establish an enclosed habitat approach, creating semi-naturalistic housing of rodents. We are developing an enclosed environment that contains both housing and testing units, in combination with monitoring via sophisticated position tracking and machine learning techniques. In this habitat, we can develop a novel phenotyping approach where the natural daily behaviour is used directly as a readout for the phenotyping of disease models (here ASD). The animals will run traditional phenotyping tasks to validate the novel approach.
We expect the developed habitat to show superior outcomes in defining new phenotypes and targets for future drug-studies. This should lead to more data per animal, more fine-grained differentiation of subtypes of disease expression, and reduce experimenter intervention and stressors for the animals.
In addition to conducting the experimental project at RU, the doctoral candidate collaborates on metalevel discussions through a secondment at KU early in the project, and will continue to work on outreach materials on the use of animals in research throughout.
Moustapha Berrakmouch
My research investigates the long-term impact of enriched habitats compared to conventional laboratory environments, aiming to produce more translatable data. The goal is to rethink how rodent models are used in neuroscience to make animal research both more humane regarding to welfare, as well as more reliable and more scientifically effective.
The central question would be: Can we design living conditions that allow animals to express more complex natural behaviors such as social interaction, exploration, and movement, in order to generate more consistent and clinically relevant data on cognition and behavior?
I was motivated to join TRANSCEND because it uniquely combines all my interests and passions for animal welfare while doing translational neuroscience, and offers an international, interdisciplinary environment where these questions are answered from different viewpoints - from the lab bench to pharmaceutical application and public ethics.
