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

本提案要求资助Promethion CORE小鼠高分辨率行为和代谢表型系统。小鼠已成为糖尿病、肥胖、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了解，特别是在神经科学方面。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，我们希望a)尽可能地将小鼠置于“自然”环境中，b)在整个测试过程中将小鼠置于熟悉的环境中，以及c)尽可能地从每只动物身上收集不同但相互关联的数据集。这意味着同时记录食物摄入量、液体摄入量、体重、能量消耗（通过呼吸气体分析测量）、活动（在笼子系统内的运动）和锻炼（轮子跑），以获得小鼠在这些实验条件下代谢表型和行为的完整图像。这是由所要求的设备实现的，因此也有助于减少和改进研究中动物的使用，因为它从更少的动物群体中提供更高质量和数量的数据，减少了研究中使用的小鼠数量。使用该设备进行的实验结果将大大加强申请人和其他研究人员正在进行和未来的研究项目，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（或伦敦其他地方）的研究人员，因此建立表现型设施将弥合伦敦大学学院的关键技术差距。

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.