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Positioning and maintaining small animals for imaging over time requires a means to secure the head, maintain the animal's body temperature and facilitate delivery of anesthesia if needed. A new Article describes an open-source, customizable 3D printable cradle design that can be used for brain imaging in awake mice and anesthetized mice and rats.
IACUCs need to ensure the application of the 3Rs, while allowing researchers to conduct their work with reasonable flexibility. We invited experts from the University of Notre Dame (Eric Felde) and Northwestern University (Stefanie Bittner), along with USDA and OLAW representatives (Louis DiVincenti and Axel Wolff) to respond to a challenging situation at Great Eastern University.
The study introduces an open-source, customizable 3D printable design for rodent conditioning for magnetic resonance imaging and other imaging modalities. The design is easy to use and can be applied to both anesthetized and awake mice, and anesthetized rats.
The authors defined rat microbial biogeography by re-analyzing publicly available RNA sequencing data from 11 organs of juvenile, adolescent, adult and aged Fisher 344 rats.