Biomedical animal studies give us indispensable insight into the harmony of an organism’s biological processes, its disruption by disease, and enable the discovery of drugs that may restore it. To actually get these valuable data, we rely on a wide array of methods that have evolved from pen-and-paper-based paradigms to increasingly complex electronic devices. Even though one of the fundamental principles of all science is reproducibility, this landscape is paradoxically dominated by proprietary tools with black-box algorithms. Over the past decade, in an attempt to regain control over their experimental data and methodology, labs have taken to developing and publishing their own software and hardware tools. This led to a bustling ecosystem of open source scientific tools built, used, maintained and extended by researchers themselves.
In this talk, I will try to give an overview of the current state in animal research methodology, with a focus on the recent tectonic shifts towards open source in search of better science, as well as our lab’s humble contributions to this ecosystem.