Measuring Locomotor Activity and Behavioral Aspects of Rodents Living in the Home-Cage

Abstract

Automatization and technological advances have led to a larger number of methods and systems to monitor and measure locomotor activity and more specific behavior of a wide variety of animal species in various environmental conditions in laboratory settings. In rodents, the majority of these systems require the animals to be temporarily taken away from their home-cage into separate observation cage environments which requires manual handling and consequently evokes distress for the animal and may alter behavioral responses. An automated high-throughput approach can overcome this problem. Therefore, this review describes existing automated methods and technologies which enable the measurement of locomotor activity and behavioral aspects of rodents in their most meaningful and stress-free laboratory environment: the home-cage. In line with the Directive 2010/63/EU and the 3R principles (replacement, reduction, refinement), this review furthermore assesses their suitability and potential for group-housed conditions as a refinement strategy, highlighting their current technological and practical limitations. It covers electrical capacitance technology and radio-frequency identification (RFID), which focus mainly on voluntary locomotor activity in both single and multiple rodents, respectively. Infrared beams and force plates expand the detection beyond locomotor activity toward basic behavioral traits but discover their full potential in individually housed rodents only. Despite the great premises of these approaches in terms of behavioral pattern recognition, more sophisticated methods, such as (RFID-assisted) video tracking technology need to be applied to enable the automated analysis of advanced behavioral aspects of individual animals in social housing conditions.

Bouts of rest and physical activity in C57BL/6J mice

“…[11, 12] suitable for a vivarium of small rodents. As recently reviewed [13-15], such HCM systems provide an excellent opportunity to collect cumulative unsupervised records of in-cage rest and PA on a large scale. The purpose of this study was to characterize spontaneous in-cage activity and rest across the circadian cycle and cycles of recurrent husbandry routines over multiple weeks to provide base line data on duration and frequency of bouts of rest and [physical] activity (PA), and how the animals use the cage floor as well as rhythmicity of rest and PA. For this purpose, we recorded cumulative data with a home-cage monitoring system (DVC® Tecniplast SpA) of C57BL/6J mice in standard IVC cages (GM500), kept either in isolation (x1) or in groups at different densities (x2, x3, x4).…”

“…[11,12] suitable for a vivarium of small rodents. As recently reviewed [13][14][15], such HCM systems provide an excellent opportunity to collect cumulative unsupervised records of in-cage rest and PA on a large scale.…”

Video-based marker-free tracking and multi-scale analysis of mouse locomotor activity and behavioral aspects in an open field arena: A perspective approach to the quantification of complex gait disturbances associated with Alzheimer's disease

“…In recent years, several computerized solutions based on the instrumental assessment of gait and posture disturbances facilitating both diagnostic and treatment effectiveness assessment procedures have been proposed (Bachlin et al, 2009 ; Bächlin et al, 2010 ; Maquet et al, 2010 ; Chung et al, 2012 ; Margiotta et al, 2016 ; Mc Ardle et al, 2017 ; de Oliveira Silva et al, 2020 ). In animal model studies, computer-aided quantitative assessment of locomotor activity and associated behavioral aspects also attracted increasing attention (Li et al, 2013 ; Nyúl-Tóth et al, 2020 ; Nyul-Toth et al, 2021 ) (for a recent methodological review, see also Klein et al ( 2022 ) and references therein).…”

Socially Integrated Polysubstance (SIP) system: an open-source solution for continuous monitoring of polysubstance fluid intake in group housed mice

“…Some HCM systems focus on tracking and analyzing social interaction (de Chaumont et al, 2019; C. J. M. I. Klein et al, 2022;Peleh et al, 2019;Redfern et al, 2017;Singh et al, 2019), while others focus on continuous monitoring of voluntary liquid or food intake (Godynyuk et al, 2019;Lee et al, 2020;Melo et al, 2022;Robinson & Riedel, 2014;Woodard et al, 2020).…”

“…Some HCM systems focus on tracking and analyzing social interaction (de Chaumont et al, 2019; C. J. M. I. Klein et al, 2022; Peleh et al, 2019; Redfern et al, 2017; Singh et al, 2019), while others focus on continuous monitoring of voluntary liquid or food intake (Godynyuk et al, 2019; Lee et al, 2020; Melo et al, 2022; Robinson & Riedel, 2014; Woodard et al, 2020). Critically, there is currently no low cost or open-source solution that allows for group housed animals to self-administer multiple substances in multiple doses in a homecage environment.…”