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A team led by Dr Adam Polak at the Fraunhofer UK Research Ltd has been awarded £100k for the aTRACKtive CRACK IT Challenge to develop a non-invasive and non-toxic method to identify individual mice from birth.
The project will have two main benefits. The first, it will enable animal welfare to be monitored from birth in a way that has not previously been easy to do due to the practical and welfare concerns associated with current options to identify individual mice such as tattooing. The second benefit is that by combining with automated tracking technology and home cage monitoring it will be possible to follow individual mice in a group-housed environment over long periods of time in order to maximise the data obtained from them.
Using their expertise in engineering and photonics and supported by the Challenge Sponsors*, the team will develop low-cost non-invasive tracking tags containing non-toxic dyes and phosphors that produce a visible colour response under illumination invisible to mice. The different colours of tags will permit the identification of four or more mice per cage, both by the human eye and using automated video tracking techniques. This means that individual mice can be identified non-invasively from birth and tracked over their lifetime without disturbing their normal behaviour.
The aTRACKtive Challenge complements the CRACK IT Challenge portfolio of animal welfare and refinement technologies, which includes the Home Cage Analyser system for automated 24/7 home cage monitoring of group-housed rodents and new dietary approaches for administering tamoxifen that avoids oral gavage or injection (intraperitoneal or subcutaneous).
Find out more about CRACK IT Challenges and the 3Rs products developed to solve them.
* The Challenge is Sponsored by MRC Harwell and the National Mouse Genetics Network members: Cardiff University and King's College London, who will provide in-kind contributions and end-user input.