Hand-Rearing Method for Infant Marmosets

Published: June 9th, 2023

DOI:

Hao Sun^1,2, Rui Li¹, Yingxu Lin^1,2, Xinyuan Cao¹, Lingzhu Fan¹, Guanglong Sun¹, Min Xie¹, Lin Zhu¹, Chencen Yu¹, Ruolan Cai¹, Chenfei Lyu¹, Xiaohui Wang^1,2, Yuanqing Zhang^1,2, Siyi Bai^1,2, Runze Qi¹, Binliang Tang^1,3, Guoqiang Jia^1,4, Xinjian Li^1,2,4, Lixia Gao^1,2,4

¹Department of Neurology of the Second Affiliated Hospital and Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience and Technology, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, ²Key Laboratory of Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, ³Rehabilitation Medicine Center, Rehabilitation & Sports Medicine Research Institute of Zhejiang Province, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital, Affiliated People’s Hospital, Hangzhou Medical College, ⁴NHC and CAMS Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology, MOE Frontier Science Center for Brain Science and Brain-Machine Integration, School of Brain Science and Brain Medicine, Zhejiang University

The common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) is a small and highly social New World monkey with high reproduction rates, which has been proven to be a compelling non-human primate model for biomedical and neuroscience research. Some females give birth to triplets; however, the parents cannot raise all of them. To save these infants, we have developed a hand-rearing method for raising newborn marmosets. In this protocol, we describe the formula of the food, the time for feeding, the configuration of the temperature and humidity, as well as the adaptation of the hand-reared infants to the colony environment. This hand-rearing method significantly increases the survival rate of marmoset infants (without hand-rearing: 45%; with hand-rearing: 86%) and provides the opportunity to study the development of marmoset infants with similar genetic backgrounds raised in different postnatal environments. As the method is practical and easy to use, we anticipate that it could also be applied to other labs working with common marmosets.