Abstract
Managing the welfare of laboratory animals is critical to animal health, vital in the understanding of phenotypes created by treatment or genetic alteration and ensures compliance of regulations. Part of an animal welfare assessment is the requirement to record observations, ensuring all those responsible for the animals are aware of their health status and can act accordingly. Although the use of zebrafish in research continues to increase, guidelines for conducting welfare assessments and the reporting of observations are considered unclear compared to mammalian species. To support the movement of zebrafish between facilities, significant improvement would be achieved through the use of standardized terms to ensure clarity and consistency between facilities. Improving the clarity of terminology around welfare not only addresses our ethical obligation but also supports the research goals and provides a searchable description of the phenotypes. A Collaboration between the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Cambridge University (Department of Medicine-Laboratory of Molecular Biology) has led to the creation of the zebrafish welfare terms from which standardization of terminology can be achieved.
Highlights
The role of gene variation in human development, physiology, and disease is complex and our understanding is limited
Managing the welfare of laboratory animals is critical to animal health, vital in the understanding of phenotypes created by treatment or genetic alteration and ensures compliance of regulations
These practical advantages include the following: the ease by which they can be housed and cared for, their rapid development, ease of breeding, high fecundity, and their transparency allowing for rapid assessment of impact due to genetic alteration or drug treatment and ease of genetic change
Summary
The role of gene variation in human development, physiology, and disease is complex and our understanding is limited. An example would be curled operculums, which is seen commonly in zebrafish with a Tubingen background.[15] While these incidental findings require management at a welfare level, the intention of the GA passport is to communicate the unexpected welfare issues.[6] In the mouse community the expected welfare issues for a background strain issue are readily available from the Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) website.[16] For example, the C57BL/6 mouse strain is susceptible to obesity, which can be managed with a modified diet.[17] to date this information was Future Perspectives This standardized language will need to evolve as our understanding of welfare progresses and we as a community recognize different impacts of genotype alteration or treatments. This would be a cross-species ontology as this would allow the use of existing knowledge and map relationships between observed phenotypes, which will lead to a better understanding of specific genetic phenotypes across species
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