There's a debate in my lab currently on the best housing practice for neurobehavior.
Should a cage contain a mixture of mice (ie; WT, KO, KO-treated) or only one (ie; KO-treated).
I am curious if housing one type together could dilute or amplify deficits.
I know there is a lot of research looking at single- vs group-housed mice but no one really talks about who should be grouped together.
Does anyone have data to support this?
TIA!
Dear Melinda Peters ,
Though I have not experience in working with KO mice you have mentioned but, I have seen that especially if your animal model has following complications then they start dominating each other causing injury, if control (WT in your case) and disease (KO in your case) has been kept in the same cage.
1. Aphasia- less food intake due to loss of appetite
2. Psychosis- due to the consequences of development of impairment in recognition memory, or increase in anxiety
3. Sleep deprivation or metabolic problem in hypothalamus
Reference:
Thanks,
Best,
Avishek Roy
Since WT and KO can be very different phenotypically, I will recommend WT animals separate group than KO and KO-treated in separate groups, You question does not indicate what behaviour null mouse has.
Hi Melinda Peters
That may depend on the tests you want to perform or the experience with the housing and behaviors of the mouse line. If uncertain, I would separate KO’s from the wild-types. But if you know they can be housed together, I would keep them together. However, this is challenging since you may need to split the litter into genotypes because of stress/fighting, etc. which will result in some mice being single housed what also often has profound effects on the results.
To work that out for each transgenic mouse line (might even change with the background strain) is a considerable effort…. Ones I needed to separate treated from control mice because the drug had profound side effects, I still ran some behavior but felt less comfortable because those mice have been together before the drug treatment.
Best,
Oliver
Subhash C. Juneja let's take the Rett Syndrome mouse, for example ( https://www.jax.org/strain/003890 ) . They seem to have pretty poor prognosis pretty early on. One of the big issues is feeding/tooth alignment. I am curious if viability could be extended if a healthy litter mate was kept with the hemizygous males.
Oliver Bracko , I too am torn about the undertaking for figuring this out. I am tempted to try a study evenly distributing my wild type controls, treated null animals, and null controls among the cages to see if survival is extended.