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Of (stressed) mice and men

Nature Methods volume 11, pages 623–624 (2014)Cite this article

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Experimenter gender affects behavioral assays of pain and stress in laboratory mice.

In vivo experiments on animals inevitably involve humans interacting with their experimental subjects. Animals are transferred by hand between home cages and testing apparatus, they are handled in the course of experimental procedures and they are observed during behavioral experiments. These interactions are likely to be stressful for the animals concerned, and stress can affect experimental outcomes1. It is therefore in the interests of both good welfare and good science to improve experimental techniques to minimize the stress of experimental subjects and, hence, reduce variability in outcome measures and decrease the number of animals required. Research published in this issue of Nature Methods adds a previously unconsidered variable to the growing list of sources of stress for laboratory rodents: the sex of the human experimenter2.

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  1. melissa.bateson@ncl.ac.uk

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melissa Bateson is at the Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.,

    Melissa Bateson

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  1. Melissa Bateson
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Competing interests

M.B. is the principal investigator on a research grant funded by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs).

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Bateson, M. Of (stressed) mice and men. Nat Methods 11, 623–624 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2965

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