Researchers could cut the use of animals in their experiments by changing the way they analyze their results, according to a study by scientists based in Germany and the United States.
In a typical animal experiment, researchers will try to standardize factors such as the animals’ genetic backgrounds and laboratory conditions to make it as easy as possible for other researchers to reproduce their results later. Now, a team led by Hanno Würbel at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, has reanalyzed a study of mouse behaviour by taking such genetic and environmental variations into account, and they got fewer spurious results, or false positives, than the initial study.