Volume 49 Issue 6, June 2020

Differential gene expression based on the parental origin can have a big impact on phenotype

Jennifer Koblinski explains how the Cancer Mouse Models Core at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Massey Cancer Center (MCC) has kept its facility up and running in the face of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Thea Brabb and Sally Thompson-Iritani explain to Lab Animal how their mouse and nonhuman primate colonies continue to be cared for at the University of Washington and Washington National Primate Research Center.

As COVID-19 continues to spread, the urgency of the hunt for effective therapeutics and vaccines has likewise grown. As with past outbreaks, animal models will be an important component of efforts to understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes disease, and how best to defeat it.

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.

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.