Behavioral phenotyping enhanced--beyond (environmental) standardization

It is basic biology that the phenotype of an animal is the product of a complex and dynamic interplay between nature (genotype) and nurture (environment). It is far less clear, however, how this might translate into experimental design and the interpretation of animal experiments. Animal experiments are a compromise between modelling real world phenomena with maximal validity (complexity) and designing practicable research projects (abstraction). Textbooks on laboratory animal science generally favour abstraction over complexity. Depending on the area of research, however, abstraction can seriously compromise information gain, with respect to the real world phenomena an experiment is designed to model. Behavioral phenotyping of mouse mutants often deals with particularly complex manifestations of life, such as learning, memory or anxiety, that are strongly modulated by environmental factors. A growing body of evidence indicates that current approaches to behavioral phenotyping might often produce results that are idiosyncratic to the study in which they were obtained, because the interactive nature of genotype-environment relationships underlying behavioral phenotypes was not taken into account. This paper argues that systematic variation of genetic and environmental backgrounds, instead of excessive standardization, is needed to control the robustness of the results and to detect biologically relevant interactions between the mutation and the genetic and environmental background of the animals.