Honey bees don’t just make honey and help pollinate crops—they’re important lab animals too. The honey bee has been used as a model organism to study social behavior, aging, development, and more, and it’s on its way to becoming a model of the gut microbiota now too.

See Zheng et al.

The Alliance Genome Database represents the combination of information from six different organisms, including worms, flies, yeast, zebrafish, mouse, and rat. With the integration of these data, biologists can more easily explore their own results.

See Howe et al.

Non-bilaterians, which represent early branches of the animal kingdom’s phylogenetic tree, share more genes with us than you might think. A better understanding of these “basic” critters may facilitate vertebrate studies as well as biomedical research.

See Neff

Ethology has a new tool. Robots are becoming an important part of study with several different groups from around the world constructing models of everything from insects to mammals in the hopes of understanding and ultimately modifying animal behavior.

See Katsnelson

Mice are a commonly used model in biomedical research. However, like with any project, using the correct tool is necessary for success. This is where proper murine nomenclature becomes critical and that investigators understand these details when using animals and reporting results.

See Mallapaty

The microbiome has an important role to play in health and a number of diseases, and animal models are essential in teasing apart those links. Enter the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, an emerging invertebrate alternative for microbiome research.

See Douglas

The Irish wolfhound, like many large dog breeds, is unfortunately prone to cancer. When pets become sick, enrolling them in a clinical trial for a new treatment can be an option. But where does clinical oversight end and research oversight begin?

See Silverman

The large flying fox (Pteropus vampyrus) is just one over 1200 different species of bat found around the world. Many are known to carry deadly diseases, and scientists are hard at work in the field and in the lab trying to understand how—before the next outbreak.

See Eisenstein 47, 97–100 (2018)

Fluorescence confocal imaging of a rat retina that has been implanted with a fully organic retinal prosthesis composed of a passive silk fibroin substrate (yellow) coated with a photovoltaic polymeric layer (red). Cell nuclei are in blue, glial cells in green. [doi:10.1038/s41684-018-0003-1]