From crisis to opportunity: Linking research on animal personality and reproducibility

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Life sciences are facing a reproducibility crisis. Originally, the crisis was born out of single alarming failures to reproduce findings at different times and locations. Nowadays, systematic studies indicate that the prevalence of irreproducible research does in fact exceed 50%. Viewed from a rather cynical perspective, Fett’s law of the lab “Never replicate a successful experiment” has thus taken on a completely new meaning. In this respect, animal research has come under particular scrutiny, as the stakes are high in terms of both research ethics and societal impact. To counteract this, it is essential to identify sources of poor reproducibility as well as to iron out these failures. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we here develop an entirely new approach to tackle poor reproducibility and increase the power of experimental findings in light of biological variation. More specifically, by the example of behavioural phenotyping studies, we propose to integrate knowledge from evolutionary biology and put stable behavioural inter-individual differences, so called “animal personalities”, into focus as a so far completely neglected source of variation in animal experiments. Our project plan comprises four work packages (WPs), from which WPs I-III build the essential experimental basis for a proof-of-principle study on reproducibility in WP IV. Briefly, WP I intends to clarify how temporal consistencies in the behaviour of laboratory mice can be assessed reliably, while WP II investigates whether personality differences explain a considerable proportion of the widely declared “residual variation” in animal experiments. It furthermore intends to validate “predictive markers” of mouse personality that can be used to identify different personality types with minimal efforts. WP III examines potential interactions between the animals’ personality and exemplary treatments, thereby elucidating whether personality is a factor that can critically affect the outcome of an animal study. Lastly, WP IV aims at linking the concept of animal personality to reproducibility research and propose a novel strategy for considering personality differences in the experimental design to improve the statistical power, and hence the reproducibility. Findings are expected to have implications for both the study of animal personality and the planning and conduct of animal experiments in basic and preclinical animal research.