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The persistence of eight pharmaceuticals from multiple classes was studied in aquatic outdoor field microcosms. A method was developed for the determination of a mixture of acetaminophen, atorvastatin, caffeine, carbamazepine, levofloxacin, sertraline, sulfamethoxazole, and trimethoprim at microg/L levels from surface water of the microcosms using solid phase extraction and high-performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet (HPLC-UV) and liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS). Half-lives in the field ranged from 1.5 to 82 d. Laboratory persistence tests were performed to determine the relative importance of possible loss processes in the microcosms over the course of the study. Results from dark control experiments suggest hydrolysis was not important in the loss of the compounds. No significant differences were observed between measured half-lives of the pharmaceuticals in sunlight-exposed pond water and autoclaved pond water, which suggests photodegradation was important in limiting their persistence, and biodegradation was not an important loss process in surface water over the duration of the study. Observed photoproducts of several of the pharmaceuticals remained photoreactive, which led to further degradation in irradiated surface waters.

Progress in science requires standardized assays whose results can be readily shared, compared, and reproduced across laboratories. Reproducibility, however, has been a concern in neuroscience, particularly for measurements of mouse behavior. Here, we show that a standardized task to probe decision-making in mice produces reproducible results across multiple laboratories. We adopted a task for head-fixed mice that assays perceptual and value-based decision making, and we standardized training protocol and experimental hardware, software, and procedures. We trained 140 mice across seven laboratories in three countries, and we collected 5 million mouse choices into a publicly available database. Learning speed was variable across mice and laboratories, but once training was complete there were no significant differences in behavior across laboratories. Mice in different laboratories adopted similar reliance on visual stimuli, on past successes and failures, and on estimates of stimulus prior probability to guide their choices. These results reveal that a complex mouse behavior can be reproduced across multiple laboratories. They establish a standard for reproducible rodent behavior, and provide an unprecedented dataset and open-access tools to study decision-making in mice. More generally, they indicate a path toward achieving reproducibility in neuroscience through collaborative open-science approaches.

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