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Environmental standardization: cure or cause of poor reproducibility in animal experiments?

Abstract

It is widely believed that environmental standardization is the best way to guarantee reproducible results in animal experiments. However, mounting evidence indicates that even subtle differences in laboratory or test conditions can lead to conflicting test outcomes. Because experimental treatments may interact with environmental conditions, experiments conducted under highly standardized conditions may reveal local 'truths' with little external validity. We review this hypothesis here and present a proof of principle based on data from a multilaboratory study on behavioral differences between inbred mouse strains. Our findings suggest that environmental standardization is a cause of, rather than a cure for, poor reproducibility of experimental outcomes. Environmental standardization can contribute to spurious and conflicting findings in the literature and unnecessary animal use. This conclusion calls for research into practicable and effective ways of systematic environmental heterogenization to attenuate these scientific, economic and ethical costs.

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Figure 1: Study design.
Figure 2: Variance between replicate experiments.
Figure 3: False positive and false negative rate.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Project Wu 494/2-1) and the 3R Research Foundation Switzerland (3R Project 77-01). We thank K. Failing for help with data analysis, and M. Dawkins and P. Bateson for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Correspondence to Hanno Würbel.

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Richter, S., Garner, J. & Würbel, H. Environmental standardization: cure or cause of poor reproducibility in animal experiments?. Nat Methods 6, 257–261 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1312

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