I'm conducting behavior tests on mice, including the Open field test, elevated plus maze, and forced swimming test. There is a 3-day time interval between these tests, so in order to test the effect of the drug, do I need to inject the drug before each test, or do I just need to inject only one dose to perform all these three tests?
Plus, our lab usually performs a battery of behavior tests within one day after one injection, however, an article [1] indicates that a time interval should be used to let animals recover, which I think is reasonable. But 3-days interval also means the drug has already been metabolized, so repeated administration is necessary, right？
[1] https://conductscience.com/maze/optimum-resting-time-for-mice-between-behavioral-tasks/
What is the half-life of the drug you are injecting in mice?? That should tell you of the drug has disappeared one or three days after injection. Multiple injections can also increase or decrease metabolism, so consider that as well. In short: no easy answer on the basis of the information you give in your question.
I agree with Dr Kan. It is essential to know the half-life of the drug to answer your question.
Another important point is whether you want to assess the acute or chronic effects. For instance, if it is acute, perhaps an injection XXX minutes before each behavioral task would be sufficient (depending on half-life and time for drug to reach the brain). In contrast, if the goal is to test the chronic effect, you could take a treatment for YYY days and then start behavioral tests. However, if you were testing the effects of a stimulant or alcohol, for example, stopping drug administration before the day of behavioral tasks can lead to confusion regarding the assessed effect: it would be difficult to distinguish whether you were evaluating the effect of chronic treatment, or the effect of "abstinence". Yes, it is quite complex!
Overall, you need to know the half-life of the drug and keep in mind what your main goal is so that you can better delineate your experimental design. It may be necessary to perform more than one type of experiment to properly test your hypothesis.
The question is what is the goal of the test. It is very broad question. As others mentioned, you need to know half life, acute or chronic use? as well as overal goal of the research. Is it drug efficacy test? is it a test to reduce effect of other drugs? and many question which should be carefully answered so that one can answer the administration intervals.
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