Purpose of research involving animals

Animal Research at the University of St Andrews

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>> PROFESSOR VERITY BROWN
School of Psychology and Neuroscience

Here at the University of St Andrews, we use animals quite extensively in our scientific research. Some of the animals are bred for the purpose and are kept here at the University. That includes mice and rats and tadpoles and toads and fish and some birds. Others are studied in their natural environment. So, for example, we have researchers that study seals in the natural environment in the Antarctic and in the North Sea, and other researchers that study, for example, the behavior of birds in their natural environment.

The kinds of work we do is very varied. So it might be because we're trying to understand the animals own behavior or how it lives in its habitat. We might be trying to understand things like a learning theory, which tells us about how all animals learn, but we would study a rat in order to find out, in order to extrapolate, how other animals are learning.

>> DR GARETH MILES
Director of Secure Research Facility

Research within our animal unit focuses on rodents, birds, frogs and fish. The main goal of our basic bioscience research is to provide new information which will lead to advances in the health and well-being of humans. However, not all of our research is concerned with human health. We also conduct research which aims to benefit the animals and the environment.

Importantly, we only use animals where there are no other alternatives, and whenever we do use animals in research, this only happens after a rigorous ethical review process. During this process, researchers have to demonstrate the value of the research they intend to conduct, and they also have to demonstrate that they have given detailed consideration to the impact on the animal.

Within the units, we maintain the highest standard of care for our animals. They are cared for by highly trained and experienced technicians. We also have a designated vet who provides care to the animals, as well as advice and help on the welfare of animals and the best way to conduct our research.

A wide range of research is conducted within the unit. Some of this work simply involves studying the way animals behave in different situations. Other work studies the way that different systems of the body work. In our unit, a lot of this focuses on the brain.

Some of the human medical disorders we directly address include Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and motor neuron disease. We use rodents to study these human diseases and the parts of the brain affected by these diseases, because the biology of the rodent brain is similar to humans. Overall, as a unit, we are continually looking for new ways to improve what we do.

>> DR JAMIE AINGE
Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience

I'm interested in how the brain helps us remember everyday things that happen to us. So things like having your breakfast or your most recent birthday. That's like a memory, is called episodic memory, and the reason we're particularly interested in episodic memory is that's the first type of memory that goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease.

So if we can figure out how the brain helps us remember those types of memories, then that will mean that we can help to test or start to test therapeutic strategies in rodents. So what we do a lot in the lab is to use different types of memory tests. This often involves getting them to explore household objects.

This is a great type of test for them because they really like in exploring new things, and by looking at things that they explored before, we can test memory for the objects that they've seen and objects that are new to them. This is particularly interesting because this is the same kind of memory as we use to remember where we parked our car, for example, and this is the kind of thing that goes wrong in Alzheimer's patients.

So if we can test different types of therapeutic strategies, so different types of drugs for example, to see if this can improve this type of memory in rats, then we can potentially start to see if we can test those same treatments in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

>> PROFESSOR VERITY BROWN
School of Psychology and Neuroscience

A healthy animal, a happy animal produces good science. It's not in our interest, it's not in the interests of the experiments or science, to have an animal that's stressed or unhappy. Therefore, animal welfare is of prime consideration to us.

>> PROFESSOR KEITH SILLAR
Head of School of Psychology and Neuroscience

My research uses frog tadpoles as a simple model system to study how nerves control animal movement. What is attractive about studying the development of movement in tadpoles is that they have a relatively simple nervous system at early stages of development, and the pattern controlling swimming, matures very rapidly after hatching. This makes the tadpole an ideal animal to investigate rules that may be common to the movements of other animal species.

Our tadpoles develop very quickly, turning into frogs in just a few weeks. So in order to produce a ready supply of tadpoles, it is necessary to mate by hormone inducement normally two pairs of adult frogs a week. We require tadpoles because we cannot fully understand how the nervous system develops or functions by using computers or other non-animal models.

By law, we have to replace animals with other methods where we can, but understanding the development of the brain requires a whole living animal, because we don't have the ability to reproduce a complete and functioning brain outside of an organism.

I also have an interest in studying the early stages of zebrafish. This is because zebrafish have this fascinating capacity to repair spinal cord injury, and we'd like to understand the pathways that are involved with this ability. Zebrafish and species like them might hold the key to unlocking how humans can recover from spinal cord injuries.

>> PROFESSOR VERITY BROWN
School of Psychology and Neuroscience

So all of the experiments that we do using animals are very highly regulated in the United Kingdom. We have to have licences before we're allowed to look with animals at all. We also have internal, in the university, we have an animal welfare committee that considers all aspects of the experiments that we're proposing, and also considers whether and asks us to consider whether there are alternatives or whether we can change the experiment to minimize the possibility of any stress or lasting harm to the animal.

In addition to that, we have external people that provide us with support that we can go to for advice, for example veterinary surgeons and a home office inspector work very closely with us. The home office inspector in addition provides assurance so that the general public and the government know that we are following the regulations closely, that we're taking it seriously, that we take our responsibilities seriously, and that the animals are indeed being kept in the best conditions that they could possibly be kept in, so that their welfare is looked after.

>> DR KAREN SPENCER
Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience

So, I've been fascinated by animal behaviour for many years now. And right now I work with bird species to understand the mechanisms that control those patterns of animal behaviour that have fascinated me for such a long time. The main reason that we use birds is because we study development, and the bird produces a fantastically sealed package in which it places its embryo, and everything in that egg is required for that bird to develop until it hatches out.

So what we can do is we can use that as an experimental tool to see how those embryos cope in different environments early on, but we can also track the development of those embryos really easily. So ultimately, that reduces the number of animals that we use in our experiments.

My group specifically right now focuses on how early life experiences can alter physiology and behaviour in later life. So we're looking at animals in the wild and also in the lab, and how life can actually be programmed, so how your phenotype can be programmed by early life conditions.

SMRU has developed a smartphone for seals to track their movement and behaviour. Vodafone is providing the communications link using Internet of Things technology.

>> PROFESSOR VERITY BROWN
School of Psychology and Neuroscience

What happens at the end of an experiment depends very much on the nature of that experiment. So if an animal has been studied in the wild and simply observed, then obviously at the end of that experiment it will just be left alone. If it's been handled, then it might have to be released under more controlled conditions. And of course, we only use animals when there is no alternative in order to answer the scientific questions.

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