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Social isolation can lead to poor mental and physical health. A new study determines that social isolation increases food and nicotine-seeking during abstinence, but that social housing can reverse these effects.
A new CRISPR/Cas9 method that can generate F0 mutant zebrafish has the potential to cut costs, spare time, and reduce animal use for researchers interested in screening loss-of-function alleles in vivo.
In this perspective, the authors discuss the use of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system to study host–microbe interactions, highlighting innovative methodologies and key findings from recent studies.
In this Perspective, the authors highlight the importance of understanding the background genetics of the zebrafish, Danio rerio, and suggest ways that the field might better report genetic information and maintain breeding colonies to improve the transparency and reproducibility of zebrafish research.
To achieve knockdown rather than knockout of particular genes, a new paper demonstrates a CRISPR/Cas13 method that can efficiently edit mRNA in zebrafish, medaka, killifish, and mouse embryos.
Cortico-striatal circuits are at the heart of many brain disorders, which means they are often studied using neurobiological animal models. A new study uses resting-state functional connectivity to assess homologies of cortico-striatal circuits in mice, monkeys, and humans.
This Review discusses the strengths of the zebrafish model for microbiome research, and highlights important insights gleaned from observational and manipulative microbiome studies in zebrafish.
Caged neurotransmitters are widely used to study neurobiological processes such as synaptic transmission and plasticity. However, uncaging has been primarily restricted to in vitro and ex vivo experimental systems. Using caged neurotransmitters in vivo has posed a huge hurdle because photoactivatable cages bind to GABA-A receptors, acting as competitive antagonists towards GABA. This reduced inhibition leads to epileptiform-like activity, which can cause problems for circuit level studies in vivo. To circumvent this off-target effect, a recent publication introduces a new caged glutamate: G5-MNI-glutamate. Using a novel technique called ‘cloaking,’ GABA-A receptor antagonism is abolished, opening up new possibilities for future in vivo studies with caged neurotransmitters.
Vasculature has an essential role both in central nervous system health and diseases. A new optimized imaging and analysis pipeline helps to characterize blood vessel network topology and plasticity across large regions in detail.
Human cancer is a disease of cooperating genetic events that is complex to model in vivo. A new study combines somatic base editing with a mouse model of breast cancer, demonstrating the potential to rapidly investigate the function of disease-specific point mutations.
Microglia play important but incompletely understood roles in the pathogenesis of neurological disease. New chimeric models using transplanted human stem cell-derived microglia-like cells hold great promise to better model the unique function of human microglia in brain disease.
With the genetics of a laboratory strain but a more diverse microbiome, ‘wildling’ mice could be a novel complement to commonly used specific pathogen-free animals in preclinical studies.
In medical research, treatments are often thought of as moving “from bench to bedside.” A new study identifies a specific treatment in zebrafish and brings it to a patient, highlighting the role of these animal models in personalized medicine.
Deep phenotyping can reveal how genetics, environment and stochasticity affect the development, physiology and behavior of an organism. In this Review, Dhaval S. Patel, Nan Xu and Hang Lu outline the technological and analytical developments that have enabled deep-phenotyping studies in Caenorhabditis elegans.
The mammalian gut microbiota confers colonization resistance against pathogenic bacteria. Specific pathogen-free C57BL/6 mice from different vendors are variably resistant to oral non-typhoidal Salmonella infection. New work shows that differences in endogenous Enterobacteriaceae determine this phenotypic variability.
Using a systems genetics approach, a new study identifies genetic variants and proteins associated with plasma and hepatic lipid abundance and hepatic lipotoxicity.
A potential new method for non-invasively monitoring physiological parameters in small animals takes advantage of radio frequency near-field coherent sensing technology
A unique paradigm to investigate the intersection between memory, pain, and stress reveals new details about the processes that underlie pain memory. In both mice and men, males seem more susceptible.
