Metabolic and behavioural phenotyping platform for obesity, diabetes, aging and exercise studies in mouse

该提案要求为Promethion CORE高分辨率小鼠行为和代谢表型分析系统提供资金。小鼠已成为糖尿病、肥胖症、癌症研究以及基础研究中广泛使用的动物模型，以增加我们对哺乳动物生理学的理解，特别是在神经科学中。能够在实验条件下从这些动物身上收集高质量的生理数据，对于进一步了解它们的身体以及我们自己的身体是如何工作的至关重要。为了生成这些高质量的数据，期望a）将小鼠保持在尽可能“自然”的环境中，B）将它们保持在该熟悉的环境中以进行整个测试，以及c）从每只动物收集尽可能多的不同但连接的数据集。这意味着同时记录食物摄入量、液体摄入量、体重、能量消耗（通过呼吸的气体分析测量）、活动（笼系统内的运动）和运动（轮跑），以获得小鼠在这些实验条件下的代谢表型和行为的完整图片。这是通过所要求的设备实现的，因此也有助于减少和改进研究中使用动物的努力，因为它提供了更高质量和数量的数据，来自更小的动物群体，减少了研究中使用的小鼠数量。使用该设备进行的实验的结果将大大增强申请人和其他人正在进行的和未来的研究计划，以了解肥胖、糖尿病、癌症、运动和衰老的生理机制。这项技术目前还没有提供给伦敦大学学院的研究人员（或其他地方在伦敦），因此建立表型分析设施将弥合一个关键的技术差距在伦敦大学学院。

This proposal requests funding for a Promethion CORE high-resolution behavioural and metabolic phenotyping system for mouse. Mice have become a widely used animal model for research in Diabetes, Obesity, Cancer as well as in basic research to increase our understanding of mammalian physiology, particularly in Neuroscience. Being able to gather high quality physiological data from these animals under experimental conditions is vital to further our understanding of how their bodies, as well as our own, work. In order to generate these high-quality data, it is desirable to a) keep the mice in an as 'natural' environment as possible, b) keep them in this familiar environment for the entirety of the tests to be conducted, and c) gather as many different, but connected, data sets from each animal as possible. This means to record food intake, fluid intake, body weight, energy expenditure (measured via gas analysis of breathing), activity (movement within the cage system) and exercise (wheel running) in parallel to get a complete picture of the metabolic phenotype and the behaviour of the mouse under those experimental conditions. This is achieved by the requested piece of equipment which thus also contributes to efforts to reduce and refine the use of animals in research, as it provides higher quality and quantity of data from a smaller group of animals reducing the number of mice used in research. The results from the experiments conducted using this equipment will substantially enhance ongoing and future research programmes by the applicants and others for studies to understand the physiological mechanisms underlying obesity, diabetes, cancer, exercise and aging. This technology is currently not available to UCL researchers (or elsewhere in London), hence establishing the phenotyping facility will bridge a critical technology gap at UCL.