Why and how we use animals
Intro
The Biological Research Facility is the Crick’s animal facility offering services to those researchers who use animals such as mice and fish to answer their research questions. For example, studying the effects of genes on development, or identifying the molecules involved in how cancer spreads. We also have a fly facility for those working with less sentient organisms.
We know that research can cause suffering to our animals. We weigh up the potential benefits of every research project against its potential harms.
Every project licence application is subject to ethical and legal oversight and we publish non-technical summaries of all the current projects with animals carried out at the Crick.
Animals at the Crick
Scientists generate vital knowledge from animal studies. Different animals are used for different types of research.
Mice and rats
We use mice to explore how genes work in normal development and in various diseases. We have multiple different lines of genetically modified mice to help researchers investigate and pinpoint the impacts of these genetic changes, and investigate therapeutic options. We sometimes use rat embryos to study development of the nervous system and sporadically use tissues of adult rats in neurophysiological studies.
Opossums
We maintain the only UK colony of laboratory opossums, which we use to study sex chromosomes. Opossums are marsupials, and studying how the genetics of their sex chromosomes compare to that in humans teaches us about fertility and development.
Frogs
We use African clawed frogs for developmental biology research. Scientists have learned a lot about development from frogs because they are relatively easy to work with, they lay lots of eggs and their embryos develop outside the body.
Ferrets
We keep less than five ferrets at any time to study flu, because they have similar respiratory anatomy, mimic the immune response seen in humans and are highly susceptible to the same flu viruses as humans. Scientists at the World Health Organization Worldwide Influenza Centre here at the Crick use them to help develop flu vaccines and identify potentially pandemic strains of flu.
Guppies and zebrafish
We use zebrafish to explore how genes work in various diseases with different genetically modified lines to help researchers pinpoint the precise effects of genetic changes. We use guppies to understand how new organs are created by studying the placenta.
Chicken eggs
We use fertilised chicken eggs to study development, as an example where embryos develop outside the body, and to incubate flu viruses for the World Health Organization Worldwide Influenza Centre.
Caring for our animals
We strive to keep our animals as comfortable as possible and minimise their suffering.
Teams of animal technologists and Named Animal Care and Welfare Officers (NACWOs) care for the animals and support researchers with their experiments, to minimise distress or adverse effects of procedures on animals.
Named Veterinary Surgeons provide healthcare support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We perform regular microbiological screening to closely monitor the health status of our animals.
Before conducting any experiments, everyone working with animals goes through extensive training and competency assessment, covering everything from legislation to hands-on animal handling, technical procedure learning and post procedure animal care. This ensures that they can perform the techniques correctly without causing unnecessary distress.
To keep their environments comfortable and interesting, we give our animals various enrichment materials. For example mice may have a small animal house inside of the cage and zebrafish may have images of pebbles underneath the tank to resemble the natural environment. We regularly trial new enrichment materials to improve the animals' environments and introduce advances in research and animal welfare.
Links
Numbers and types of animals used
Every year, we record the number of regulated procedures conducted on animals and report these to the Home Office.
Animals in Research policy
All work involving animals follows our Animals in Research policy.
