Denver, CO, USA. Researchers have found the brains of mice used in laboratories worldwide can be profoundly affected by the type of cage they are kept in, a breakthrough that may require scientists to reevaluate the way they conduct future experiments.

Mice are the chief research mammals in the world today, involved in some of the most promising cancer, genetic and neuroscience breakthroughs.

Researchers from different universities rely on careful comparison of experimental results for their discoveries.

Findings that test results can be skewed may trigger a recalibration of past results and reconsideration of future experimental procedures. The work was conducted by researchers from the Anschutz Medical Campus at the University of Colorado. Their findings appear in the journal PLoS One.

Housing differences result in marked behavioral changes.

Pictures and comparisons of a high ventilation (HV) cage and a low ventilation (LV) cage used for research mice.

Click Pic for Details"We assume that mice used in laboratories are all the same, but they are not," said Diego Restrepo, is director of the Neuroscience Program and professor of cell and developmental biology. "When you change the cages you change the brains and that affects the outcomes of research."

Diego Restrepo
Professor
Cell & Developmental BiologyRestrepo discovered that the brains of mice are extremely sensitive to their environment and can physically change when moved from an enclosure where air circulates freely to one where it does not. The portion of the mouse's brain responsible for its keen sense of smell, the olfactory bulb, is altered.

Restrepo also found profound changes in the levels of aggression when mice are moved from one type of cage to another.

The results, he says, can greatly affect the accuracy of the research and call the results into question. Two different laboratories doing the same experiments may get totally different results and never know why. "This could explain some of the failures to replicate findings in different laboratories and why contradictory data are published by different laboratories even when genetically identical mice are used as subjects," said Restrepo.

The consequences could mean good science derailed or promising research abandoned simply due to the design of a mouse cage – something largely overlooked until now.

Restrepo hopes scientists will work to uncover the depth of the problem and find ways to overcome it. "We need to ensure that laboratory findings are truly indicative of natural processes and not simply the result of environmental factors within each lab," he said.

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let me know if you have support for researcher!!!!! ,

23 December 2011     

I am TILAHUN YOHANNES Biomedical sciences stream masters student of Addis Ababa University, in Ethiopia. in this acadamic year (2011-may2012) I will do my M.Sc. thesis. my work is on the prophylaxis properties of three locally, as well as In vivo and in vitro, well known and have antimalarial properties. this research may have some contribution to the war against Malaria eradication and control. also I am keen interested in doing such research which have at list little value for the society. but here in Addis ababa University we do have some scarcity in some reagent, mice and mice cages. the reagents needed for this research will offered from BEI Resource, Thanks for them I am free for the reagent thinking. but the mice and the cage is stile doesn't have solved. would you give me mice and cages? and can I get fund from You through you? please take in to consideration my eagerness for the work, the scarcity in our institution and the little value of the out come of this paper for the society so don't ignore it and don't let me miss it. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tilahun Yohannes

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