ArticlePloS one2021
Incorporating inter-individual variability in experimental design improves the quality of results of animal experiments.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Buzzed but not elated? Effect of ethanol on cognitive judgement bias in honeybees.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- A newFrontiers in toxicology · 2026Article
- Critical insights into the potential risks of antipsychotic drugs to fish, including through effects on behaviour.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Balancing ethics and statistics: machine learning facilitates highly accurate classification of mice according to their trait anxiety with reduced sample sizes.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Better statistical reporting does not lead to statistical rigour: lessons from two decades of pseudoreplication in mouse-model studies of neurological disorders.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Article
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- Design and validation of novel flow cytometry panels to analyze a comprehensive range of peripheral immune cells in mice.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
- Identifying cancer-associated leukocyte profiles using high-resolution flow cytometry screening and machine learning.Frontiers in immunology · 2023Article
- The rearing environment persistently modulates mouse phenotypes from the molecular to the behavioural level.PLoS biology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Inter-individual variability in quantitative traits is believed to potentially inflate the quality of results in animal experimentation. Yet, to our knowledge this effect has not been empirically tested. Here we test whether inter-individual variability in emotional response within mouse inbred strains affects the outcome of a pharmacological experiment. Three mouse inbred strains (BALB/c, C57BL/6 and 129S2) were behaviorally characterized through repeated exposure to a mild aversive stimulus (modified Hole Board, five consecutive trials). A multivariate clustering procedure yielded two multidimensional response types which were displayed by individuals of all three strains. We show that systematic incorporation of these individual response types in the design of a pharmacological experiment produces different results from an experimental pool in which this variation was not accounted for. To our knowledge, this is the first study that empirically confirms that inter-individual variability affects the interpretation of behavioral phenotypes and may obscure experimental results in a pharmacological experiment.
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