Within a phase, we provide a facility for you to create your animal “groups”. Based on your study design, typically you may have 2 main groups:
- Control groups (for example where sham / placebo compounds are injected or where no interventions are conducted, but for who observational data is to be collected)
- Study or treatment groups (these being the groups where animals are organised according to the variables of the research: e.g. sex, interventions, observations, dosing regime etc.)
Adding an Experiment
To add an experiment / experimental group, you must click to select the Phase to which the experiment will below, as shown below.
Click on the Add experiment button to add an experiment. This will show the form below.
Input a Title for the experiment. The following sections discuss how you might name your experiments and / or groups, for example, depending of whether you are blinding your study and / or creating control groups.
The start and end dates of the experiment must be within the start and end dates of phase to which it belongs.
Click on the Add button to save the experiment.
There is no limit to the number of experiments you can define.
If you have used a system, such as the NC3Rs EDA tool to design your experiments, you will already know how many experimental groups to create and how many animals will need to be enrolled in each group.
Note
- Experiments will generally be defined according to the number and types of variable that you are studying, where the variable may be animal characteristic, such as gender, strain or age; treatment type, such as compound, dose level, cell line or other outcome group of interest.
- Other variables, such as husbandry practices, diet, housing conditions, etc. should be recorded in the Notes section of the study, where they are common to all experiment groups. If any of these environmental conditions vary between groups, it may be appropriate to explicitly record these as declared and differentiated Test Methods, so that their effect can be analysed in the post study analysis.
Experimental groups and sample size
If you have used the EDA tool, the study design will have helped you work out how many groups you need and how many animals in each group are required to have the correct power and sample size.
You can create as many study groups as you wish.
You can name the study groups as you wish, so you can distinguish the variables of each group. For example:
- Control group, male
- Control group female
- Group 1 – High dose, compound AG-013736, Male
- Group 2 – Low dose, compound AG-013736, Male
- Group 3 – High dose, compound AG-013736, Female
- Group 4 – Low dose, compound AG-013736, Female