A crossover design was used to evaluate 3 holding conditions (bucket, home cage, and home cage with supplemental heat) and 3 restraint devices (stainless steel, plexiglass, and another rodent restraint device). We sought to compare standard conditions with alternate practices to determine the least stressful holding and restraint conditions for lateral tail vein blood collection. A question arose during an IACUC semiannual facility inspection about whether these conditions may be stressful to the animals. As a standard, groups of rats are held in tall plastic buckets to facilitate warming for vasodilation and then restrained in a perforated stainless steel restrainer for blood collection. At our company, blood collection from the lateral tail vein in conscious rats is commonly performed for pharmacokinetic studies. However, restraint is a well-described stressor for many species. P2 Evaluation of Stress Associated with Warming and Restraint Methods for Blood Collection from the Lateral Tail Vein in Sprague Dawley RatsĪW Greenstein *1, CM Allen 1, Y Sun 2, NA Bratcher 3, LV Medina 3ġComparative Medicine, AbbVie, North Chicago, IL 2Exploratory Statistics, AbbVie, North Chicago, IL 3Animal Welfare & Compliance, AbbVie, North Chicago, ILīlood collection from conscious animals avoids the physiologic and pharmacologic impact of anesthetic drugs. The other benefits include improved communication with a real connection between animal caretakers and researchers, new skills acquired for our animal caretakers as this welfare assessment was seen as a first step in our mouse phenotyping pipeline, and the creation of comprehensive scientific information on GA mice. This assessment framework provides an improvement of welfare by minimizing the potential for pain, suffering, and distress. This passport will ensure that specific information related to animal welfare is accessible to whoever will care for these lines. A scoring sheet is used to interpret those observations, score the phenotype, and compile data in a kind of passport, a document which is to follow mice when the lines are distributed worldwide. Mendelian ratios and fertility are also followed.
A set of criteria dedicated to neonates and to grown-up animals from high-level categories, such as appearance, behavior, clinical signs, and relative size has been used. We have created a tool for caretakers to record their daily observations easily in a macros-enabled spreadsheet. For that, we have followed the recommendations from the European Working Group on severity assessment specifying that welfare assessment should be performed when the line is established (from F2 onwards) at 3 key time-points (after birth, around weaning, and following sexual maturity) on 7 animals per gender and per genotype, and from 2 different litters as a minimum.
A working group has been set up in order to establish a common process of welfare assessment on our new mouse lines. We present here how we’ve implemented welfare assessment. We provide a comprehensive set of specialized services related to generating GA mice on a large scale with a high-throughput phenotypic analysis. Among them, welfare assessment of newly created genetically altered (GA) mice have to be considered, as their use in research is significant.
Since the adoption of the European Directive 2010/063 EU, many specific provisions had to be implemented to improve protection and welfare of animals used for scientific purposes. I Goncalves *1, P Lopes 2, D Ali-Hadji 1, A Ayadi 1, C Fremond 2, K Lipson 2, M Malissen 3, G warcollier 3, B Malissen 3, Y Herault 1ġPhenomin-ICS, Illkirch, France 2Phenomin-TAAM, Orléans, France 3Phenomin-CIPHE, Marseille, France P1 Welfare Assessment of Genetically Altered Mice in a French Multisite Phenogenomics Infrastructure