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The EQIPD Quality System (QS) was conceptualized and established by an international consortium consisting of academic and industrial partners to ensure that non-regulated biomedical research will be conducted according to Good Research Practice expectations. The QS supports researchers to reflect on and improve internal practices by providing a systematic framework and guidance for implementing the EQIPD QS in a time and cost effective manner. This report describes the content of the EQIPD QS with its key features and 18 Core Requirements (CR) in more detail. It gives a short background on each CR and hands on examples on how they were addressed by two different research labs in their respective laboratory environments. Thereby, this article provides examples and direction for other research labs who aim to implement the QS as well. The final paragraphs discuss the potential benefits of the QS in respect to different user groups and stakeholders within the scientific community and summarize the overall governance structure of the EQIPD framework., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors have no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: Deficits in social behaviour, e.g. social withdrawal, appear as an early sign of many neuropsychiatric disorders. Investigation of the biological basis of social withdrawal and development of new targets for treatment requires reliable quantification methods of social behaviour., New Method: In order to study behavioural deficits in preclinical rodent models, we developed a tracking and analysis tool for behavioural observations in groups of mice. RFID-Assisted SocialScan is based on video tracking supported by radio-frequency identification (RFID). For this purpose, mice were labelled with RFID tags providing unique animal identity and location in the arena. An integrated software package enables automatic detection of predefined behavioural events, which are extracted from video recordings. We designed a social arena that can be flexibly adapted for various behavioural experiments., Results: We demonstrate the utility of our newly developed tracking tool by monitoring colonies of C57BL/6 J mice. We assessed social (approach, contact, follow, leave) and locomotor activities over multiple days., Comparison With Other Existing Methods: RFID-Assisted SocialScan is an automated tracking and analysis tool for long-term behavioural observations of multiple freely moving mice housed in ethologically relevant environment., Conclusions: Here, we demonstrate the performance of a newly developed behavioural tracking system that can be used for long-term translational studies of social behaviour in groups of freely moving mice., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Disrupted sociability and consequent social withdrawal are (early) symptoms of a wide variety of neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, depressive disorders and Alzheimer's disease. The paucity of objective measures to translationally assess social withdrawal characteristics has been an important limitation to study this behavioral phenotype, both in human and rodents. The aim of the present study was to investigate sociability and social withdrawal in rodents using an ethologically valid behavioral paradigm, the Visible Burrow System (VBS). The VBS mimics a natural environment, with male and female rodents housed together in an enclosure where a large open arena is connected to a continuously dark burrow system that includes 4 nest boxes. In this study, mixed-sex colonies of C57BL/6J and of BTBR mice have been investigated (n = 8 mice per colony). Results showed marked differences between the two strains, in terms of sociability as well as social withdrawal behaviors. In particular, BTBR mice performed less social behaviors and have a preference for non-social behaviors compared to C57BL/6J mice. Neurobiologically, the decreased sociability of BTBR was accompanied by reduced GABA and increased glutamate concentrations in brain prefrontal cortex (PFC) and amygdala regions. In conclusion, our study validated the use of the VBS as an ethologically relevant behavioral paradigm in group-housed mice to investigate individual sociability and social withdrawal features and their underlying neurobiology. This paradigm may provide new insights to develop new therapeutic treatments for behavioral dysfunctions that may be relevant across neuropsychiatric diseases., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)