ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Experiment page > Setting up treatment groups and animals > Assigning animals to the treatment groups

Assigning animals to the treatment groups

Details

When you enter treatment groups the system will create records for the individual animals. In the example shown in figure 1 it will, unsurprisingly, create 24 such records.

Figure 1. An experiment which consists of four treatment groups of 6 animals each.

But what treatment should the first animal receive? It might seem obvious to say it should receive treatment 1, but the second animal, treatment 1 too?  As ANY-maze tests animals in order (i.e. animal 1 is tested first, then animal 2, and so on) assigning animals to treatment groups in this way would mean that you would test all the animals for treatment 1 and then all the animals for treatment 2 - probably not what you'd want to do.

As you may know already, the way ANY-maze assigns animals to treatment groups is actually defined in the protocol. You'll find full details in the Choosing how to assign animals to the treatment groups topic, but in essence you can either choose to have ANY-maze assign the animals to treatments using one of a number of standard methods or you can tell the system that you'll perform the assignment yourself.

So, what actually happens here is that ANY-maze uses the details you've entered to create one record for each treatment group and one record for each animal - it then looks at the protocol and, unless you've chosen manual assignment, assigns the animals to the groups in the appropriate way. For example, one of the standard methods of assigning animals is called cyclic. Using this method the first animal is assign to the first treatment group, the 2nd animal to the 2nd group, the 3rd animal to the 3rd group and so on until all the groups include one animal, it then cycles round and the next animal is assigned to the first group, the next one to the 2nd group and so on.

Manually assigning animals to treatment groups

In fact, most people prefer to use manual assignment. In this case you need to specify which treatment each animal will receive. The easiest way to do this is by selecting the View animals button, which will show the Animals spreadsheet, instead of the Treatments groups spreadsheet - see figure 2.

Figure 2. The easiest way to enter animal treatments when manually assigning animals to treatment groups in using the Animals spreadsheet shown here. You simply need to enter the appropriate treatment code against each animal.

In the Animals spreadsheet you can quickly and easily enter the appropriate treatment code against each animal. By the way, if you're wondering why you'd be entering treatment codes (rather than treatment names) and what these codes actually are - you'll find the answers here.

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ANY-maze help topic T0748