gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Progress in biomedical research involves reproducibility of findings and an adequate management of research data [1]. Especially in complex and expensive research experiments, detailed and globally comprehensive depictions of methods involving animal models are crucial to understand and reproduce experimental designs.

Here, we describe our approach for a standardized documentation of model organisms, exemplary for mouse lines. Aiming at a sustainable research data management, a web-based module for storing and sharing mouse related research data is introduced within a persistent Research Data Platform (RDP) [2].

State of the Art: Publications in scientific journals are subject to increasingly precise policies. Policies often demand to publish associated research data, metadata and materials in publicly available online repositories in order to contribute to the reusability of data and reproducibility of findings.

Key concepts such as the FAIR guiding principles [3] and the ARRIVE guidelines [4] for improving the reporting of research using animals as well as the specific MGI guidelines [5] for nomenclature of mouse and rat strains are applied to improve the documentation of mouse related research data in a sustainable and standardized manner.

Concept: In cooperation with scientists on-site, we determined initial requirements for the documentation of mouse related research data in the context of the CRC 1002 and DZHK in Göttingen. A thorough analysis of the ARRIVE guidelines, publication instructions of journals and the internationally standardized nomenclature of the Jackson Laboratory Guidelines for Nomenclature of Mouse and Rat Strains completed the derived requirements and resulted in the creation of a metadata schema and minimum dataset. On this basis, we aim at providing a web-based mouse line catalogue as an RDP module that integrates the analyzed standardized documentation guidelines.

Implementation: The mouse line catalogue is implemented as one of ten modules of a web-based RDP to support scientists with sustainable research data management. It offers the possibility to document single mouse lines and individual mice thereof. The data in the catalogue comprises inter alia details about the mouse line itself (e.g. breeding type, strain name), genetic mutations according to the gene nomenclature of the NCBI Gene DB and provenance data. Different levels of data sharing are offered as well as a functionality to link mouse lines and data sets to corresponding scientific publications in the RDP. Each data entry is assigned a persistent identifier compatible with the Handle system which can be used in scientific publications to refer to specific resources better than by stating a more or less unique label.

Lessons Learned: Despite isolated initiatives, so far no universal standardized nomenclature for mouse-related research data has been established which poses challenges of harmonization among different types of documentation. Our initial approach is restricted to the documentation of the most commonly used types of mouse lines because modelling the complete fine-grained nomenclature for mice of the Jackson Laboratory is complex and needs to be advanced in the future.

Existing local software solutions that are designed to fulfill regulatory animal management requirements are not suitable for reproducibility-improving research data management tasks.

This work was funded by the DFG for the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1002 on Modulatory Units in Heart Failure, subproject INF.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.