Zootechnical data analysis in a breeding animal facility: tracing the patterns of mouse production

With the enactment of the Brazilian Law Arouca 11,794/2008 and Decree 6.899/2009, there has been an urgent need for changes in the processes related to animal experimentation in Brazil; in particular, there is a need for improvements in enhancements of the lab animal management. To improve the management capacity of the Lab animal facility of the Carlos Chagas Institute's Laboratory Animals Science (LAS), BioterC software was developed and implemented in 2014 for tracking mouse laboratory colonies. Five years after the implementation of this software, we sought to analyze the information in the database originated from BioterC using the Exploratory Analysis Data methodology (EDA). This article aims to identify animal breeding patterns using a data mining tool (Data Science) with Python programming language.

The results show that from September 2014 to June 2019, under the license IACUC number LW- 6/17, 15.106 animals were produced. The C57BL/6, BALB/c and Swiss strains were the most frequently produced strains. The distribution of births due to crosses between these strains showed a median of 6 to 10 animals, depending on the genetic homozygosis and heterozygosis of the animal. The median number of days of mating was 35 days. In the sexing period, the records reported a median of 19 days. A total of 393 requests for animals from internal and external laboratories were registered. It was noted that approximately half of the animals produced to meet the demand for orders were discarded. Of the 15,106 animals, 38% were requested for animal experimentation, 58% were discarded and 4% did not have an outcome recorded in the data.

This volume of data provides an initial view of the information retrieval capabilities contained in BioterC, allowing for unique breeding knowledge by installing laboratory animals.