Providing structural enrichment is a widespread refinement method for laboratory rodents and other animals in captivity. So far, animal welfare research has mostly focused on the effect of increased complexity either by accumulating or combining...
Healthy brain development depends on early social practices and experiences. The risk gene CACNA1C is implicated in numerous neuropsychiatric disorders, in which key characteristics include deficits in social functioning and communication. Recently, we reported sex-dependent...
The forced swim test (FST) is a traditional assay, which has been used for more than 40 years to assess antidepressant effects of novel drug candidates. In recent years, a debate about the test has...
Our research examined the nest-building characteristics of two mouse species native to Hungary, the mound-building mouse (Mus spicilegus) and the house mouse (Mus musculus), under laboratory housing conditions. In indoor housing, the nest-building material plays...
Intrapleural injections can be used in mice to deliver therapeutic and diagnostic agents and to model human disease processes (for example, pleural fluid accumulation, malignant pleural disease, and lung cancers). In the context of establishing...
In rats reared without play, or with limited access to play during the juvenile period, the dendrites of pyramidal neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) exhibit more branching than rats reared with more typical...
Throughout the last decade, the estimated global human preterm birth rate was 10.6 %, with higher rates in Asia, South America, and Africa. Preterm individuals, even in adulthood, are more likely to develop cardiorespiratory, renal...
Facial expressions are an increasingly used tool to assess emotional experience and affective state during experimental procedures in animal models. Previous studies have successfully related specific facial features with different positive and negative valence situations...
Exposure to an enriched environment (EE) has been reported to generate multiple beneficial effects in rodents, including – among the many – amelioration of anxiety-related behaviors. The present study investigated whether living in an EE...
Currently, metabolic cages (MC) are the only way to achieve serial sampling of urine and feces in rodents. However, the use of this caging creates a dramatic change from an animal’s usual microenvironment. Here we...