DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.188706.1 ISSN: 2046-1402

Managing Rodent Colonies Using Airtable: a Flexible Cloud-Based Database

Will Wasielewski, Hong Phan, McKinlee Gobble, Katie Liu, Aluet Borrego Alvarez, Stephen Stone
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Background It is imperative for modern labs to develop methods to manage their rodent colonies effectively and efficiently. Traditional handwritten and laboratory notebook-based approaches are difficult to scale and are prone to error. Relational databases have been built to address this problem, but many existing options are difficult to use, costly, and inflexible. Airtable is a cloud-based database primarily marketed towards the business sector that has not previously been described for rodent colony management. Methods As a proof of concept, the investigators built a custom database in Airtable to manage a transgenic mouse colony used to study diabetes, including tables for animal identifiers, breeding records, cage assignments, and longitudinal weight and glucose measurements. Results The resulting database supported unique animal identification, linked breeding and cage records, automated age calculations, conditional formatting to flag abnormal glucose values, mobile data entry within the vivarium, and API-based data export and backup. Advantages of Airtable in this context include its ease of use, multi-platform support, customizability, and cost-effectiveness. Limitations include its non-specific design for rodent colony management, per-user pricing, and limited data revision history in paid plans. Conclusions Airtable can be customized to efficiently manage a rodent colony and offers labs a flexible, low-cost alternative to purpose-built colony management software. A working template base is provided to help other investigators adapt Airtable to their own colonies.

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